


The Solace of Sentience

by ruethereal



Category: Merlin (BBC)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2010-07-02
Updated: 2012-07-25
Packaged: 2017-10-10 08:53:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 20,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/97873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruethereal/pseuds/ruethereal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being commissioned as a mercenary isn't new to Arthur.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: Now I'm Here

**Author's Note:**

> OK here goes: This is undeniably the biggest, craziest, lost-in-the-woods-with-a-wolf-on-the-loose-while-unarmed-est thing I've ever been stupid enough to think of tackling. The concept is heavily inspired by (to the point it's more like "brazenly stolen from") Richard K. Morgan's _Altered Carbon_. But, aside from the idea of digital "reincarnation," I'm completely making this up as I go. Comments will be deeply, deeply appreciated, even if they're only a quick "Go!" or "NO NO NO what the hell are you thinking?!"

It’s only the second breath that hurts.  The first, you’re hardly conscious enough to realize you’re breathing in, drowning in the cryo shit; the third, your tank’s already been drained and anonymous hands are using anonymous objects to siphon off whatever hasn’t sublimated.  If you’re lucky, by the fourth-fifth-sixth, you actually have some sensation in your extremities, or you actually have some control over closing your maw and ungluing your eyelids.

Arthur’s done this enough times, the preservative’s lost that invasive feeling even when he knows he should feel like he’s dying, suffocating, when really he just notes the faint tang of the nitrogen, smelling and tasting it.  He twitches his fingers, also noting that the digits are still reacting on delay relative to his thoughts of_move, fucking fingers, move already_.  Still, the fact that they were moving at all so soon means he’s been shoved into a better quality Gauntlet1 than the last.

Small consolation, really.

He takes a few shallow breaths and feels the skin of the Gauntlet blooming with goosebumps.  The air he inhales is hot and damp; the air exhaled, icy and arid.  A Gauntlet’s lungs, regardless of the Grade2, are always the last to achieve homeostasis.  You’d think, with the exponential growth of innovations in qualo-cryogenics3, -compression4, and –dumping5, the cult of lab coat-wearing scientists-playing-god would’ve figured out how to make lungs heat up faster.  There were hydrogen bombs before the close of the second millennium, after all.

“How long was I compressed?”

Arthur’s done this enough times, he can tell by the timbre of his new voice that he’s been qualodumped into a Briton-descended Gauntlet, probably near or just made twenty years.  He asked because, even though he hasn’t bothered to open his eyes, he can sense—if only vaguely, and from a long distance away—a Squire6 hovering near the lower-half of his new body, probably making arbitrary checkmarks on a clipboard.

The Squire ignores him, answering instead with pinpricks to the soles of both Arthur’s feet.  Arthur grunts, the sound almost elegant in his new voice, and wills his Gauntlet’s hands into fists.  They’re reacting near real-time now.  Small consolation.  So Arthur asks again,

“How long have I been qualopressed?”

After several silent moments of more checkmarks and prods: “Twelve years, four months.  Your Gauntlet’s been tanked for eighteen months—medical reasons.”

The voice, if you could call it that, was metallic, monotone.  Arthur forces his eyes open to stare at the Squire, forces his new mouth into what he hopes looks like a wry grimace.

“The feds still have you fuckers wearing those helmets, I see.”

“Not much changes in a decade, I’m afraid,” is the droned reply.

Arthur gives a single, mirthless laugh.  A few qualodumps back, Arthur untanked surrounded by half a dozen Squires, all of them in painfully white, Teflon-mesh coveralls and massive helmets complete with opaque visors and breathing masks.  He found out later that it was the new qualocryo regulation to protect the Squires’ identities—age, gender, nationality, maybe sexual preference, too—when people were dumped and pulled from the tanks.  Arthur distinctly remembers his response: ‘_Anonymity is for cunts._’  For that, the post-qualodump-and-untanking shrink had him dosed with a benzo.

“So, am I allowed to know why I’ve been DUT’d two-and-a-half years early?”

Of course, he is.  A person can’t be dumped and untanked without being debriefed immediately after the fact.  That would be immoral and unethical, otherwise.

“You’ve been commissioned.”

Well, that isn’t new.  Arthur can count on one hand—no matter whose it once was—the number of times he’s been dumped for a non-mercenary purpose.

“By whom?”

He lets his eyes drift shut, tries flexing his Gauntlet’s legs.  He isn’t particularly interested in which corrupt leader’s hired him to clean up a black market scuffle.

“Uther Pendragon, to find the whereabouts of his niece and her abductors.”

Also not new.

“Sounds like a nice break from qualopress oblivion,” he says, more to himself than his attendant.  Then, opening his eyes to watch himself raise the Gauntlet’s arms and test the still-stiff elbow joints, he adds, “So, who am I?”

Out of context, that question would sound ridiculous, but the Squire knows what he’s asking.  Still, Arthur notices the hesitation before the answer,

“Your Gauntlet is Pendragon’s son, Arthur.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Gauntlet: equivalent to RKM's "sleeve;" the body with which a person's consciousness is connected, or "dumped"  
> 2\. Grade: quality of a Gauntlet (examples: First-Generation Gauntlet, meaning it's the original body of someone deceased or in a vegetative state, thus sometimes retaining memories, skills, etc.; Gem Gauntlet, short for Gemini Gauntlet, meaning it's a cloned body, thus completely lacking memories, skills, etc.; Template, an entirely synthetic Gauntlet, thus more of an android, into which a person is dumped)  
> 3\. Qualocryogenics: refers to the science of preserving sentience which is later dumped in a Gauntlet  
> 4\. Qualocompression: refers to the storing of a person's identity, consciousness, sentience, etc. in a disc to later be dumped in a Gauntlet  
> 5\. Qualodumping: refers to the uploading (of sorts) of a person's qualopressed being in a Gauntlet  
> 6\. Squire: a qualocryogenic technician of any stage of the process


	2. Don't Lose Your Head

Arthur doesn’t remember a lot of things.  When he takes inventory of his memories, some blanks are frustrating, while others are downright hilarious.  He can’t remember most of his old, first, original life—when his Gauntlet wasn’t a Gauntlet but _his own body_ that he was born with, grew with, experienced firsts with (sex, alcohol, drugs)—when his ‘self’ wasn’t an implantable disc the size of a cufflink but a beautiful mess of regrets and vices and lessons learned.  He can’t remember his last name from that time but, unlike most slaves to the qualocryo system, he thinks it’s a negligible part of his identity; nor can he remember what he looked like or when his birthday is (both are also negligible) or where he was born (his non-joke is that he was spawned in a qualocryo tank, the number of times he’s woken up in one).

Though he doesn’t know his birthday, Arthur’s quite sure his subjective age is twenty-seven, give or take a year.  On the other hand, his age in real-time needs a calculator to get near the “give or take a year” mark: he’s been in and out of qualocryo thirty-three times, dumped for durations ranging between two weeks and a year, compressed for durations ranging between a month and twenty-fucking-years.  Sometimes, there’s culture-shock; sometimes, he finds a twisted kind of amusement in his new situation; sometimes, there’s an all-consuming desire to kill the new Gauntlet he’s been dumped into, hoping the shrinks deem him _too_ unstable, hoping he’ll be compressed for the last time, left on a shelf in a somewhat dignified and metaphorical death.

Some memories aren’t his, just lingering ones from the Gauntlets he’s been in, latched onto his disc like bad hangovers: getting married (three of them); holding a newborn girl (Arthur can’t stand children); setting an office on fire (he likes to think this is his, but he’s never had to resort to arson); being a pallbearer (five of these).  Some memories that _do_ belong to him are nauseatingly vivid, accumulating throughout his ventures into the solid, living, breathing world: strangling a young district attorney with the small, delicate hands of the only female Gauntlet he’s been dumped in; watching himself dig spidery fingers into his Template’s oozing, sparking abdomen to fish for frags; ripping the ear off an _exceptionally_ crooked and stubborn arms dealer so hard the guy’s neck snapped.

Arthur wouldn’t have these memories—shit, he wouldn’t be a plaything to people with money and paranoia to begin with—if it wasn’t for the one memory that is undeniably from his original life: Arthur’s a hitman.

The first time he was qualodumped and untanked, he was conscious for only a couple of hours.  The feds had him dumped into a Template with a disabled pseudo-nervous system, then had the Template arranged in a chair (restraining it at the forearms, torso and ankles, the fucking pussies), so that they could talk to Arthur, explain to him that, while he was aiming a sniper at the Prime Minister (Arthur’s actually forgotten of which country), the feds had a sniper trained on him—that, while he thought he was under the service of some neo-Communist cell, the feds had paid out its leaders to set Arthur up—that, while it would’ve been easier to just let him die, a hole in the body he can’t remember wide enough to fit a grown man’s leg through, they wanted Arthur to undergo some form of punishment and so had him qualocompressed while he was tachy on the operating table.

After those two hours of paralysis, of being forced to endure the uniformed dogs’ smug mockery, Arthur was given a qualocompression sentence of a buck-and-twenty years.  To Arthur’s surprise, the next time he was dumped, it was into a Navy SEAL’s Gauntlet a century in advance.  It turned out Uncle Sam needed the quick, clean dispatching of a neo-Nazi faction’s key warmonger.  The next few times he was dumped and untanked for a “job,” the qualocryo fucks—otherwise known as NATO’s Advanced Qualocryogenic Cooperative, but Arthur thinks “NATO AQC Co-op” is a stupid name—wasted a lot of time telling him that he was still expected to serve the remaining one-hundred years (eleven months, eighteen days, and fourteen hours, but who was keeping track, really?) of his qualopress sentence, that he was being dumped _just this once_ to _covertly take care of business_, that fulfilling these _civil and state duties_ would earn credit to his name (mononym that it is) along with due payment.

They stopped after the fifth time, when Arthur kindly assured them that he had no intentions of going renegade since he was well aware of the fact that his qualocryo disc was tagged and ‘only you fuckers, the bunch of idiots that you are, would rub that in my face with innuendo and babytalk.’  And like that, Arthur was back on the market.

 

It didn’t take long for Arthur to get used to the qualocryo process.  Thing is, getting compressed, contrary to what the qualocryo advertisements tell you, is _nothing_ like falling asleep.  You’re restrained—they say it’s for your safety, but really it’s for the Squires’, in case you get jumpy beforehand or have a seizure during (for the price and flair of those helmets, they must be flimsy to need protection from flailing limbs)—lying facedown on a sort of masseur table.   That’s probably where they get the “falling asleep” thing.  The Squires give the back of your neck a local anesthetic, make a two-inch incision through to the vertebral column, and there you are: an octagonal piece of plastic covered in filigree wiring, shoved into the space chiseled between the C3 and C4 vertebrae to make the nervous system compatible with the metaqualia interface.

It’s never bloody, and you can never tell when the Squire has your disc in the neuro-forceps (three-hundred dollar tweezers).  But when they start pulling on it, taking it out, that’s when the weird shit happens.  If falling asleep feels like your senses are being deleted, shorting out one at a time, _that _is what it feels like to be qualopressed:

First to go is sight.  There’s no fanfare, no blue screen or television static.  Just black.  And not the darkness of closing your eyes, when there’s still heat behind them, still the visible flowing of blood through paper-thin eyelids.  It’s the black of deep space.  Next go taste and smell together.  It’s hard to notice initially, since the room you’re in is so sterile it doesn’t smell like anything to begin with.  But then you realize you can’t taste the nachos or tequila or cigarette you had right before the procedure anymore.  Next, hearing, is the most unsettling.  The room may be odorless, but it sure as hell isn’t silent.  There’s the whirring and beeping of the machinery and medical shit you’re hooked up to.  And fuck-all if the Squires have proper bedside manner, so they’re probably gossiping or discussing bets on games or giving you a few final words of ‘you’re about to rot in your own mind, asshole.’  Last of all is sensation.  Unlike sight, this is gradual, starting with fingers and toes, then whole limbs, your face, a creeping numbness up your back, and you even lose that writhing feeling in your gut.

Oddly enough, this happens in about two seconds.  It takes two seconds for the vertebral interface to register it’s being pulled, so all your thoughts rush into the disc, all your senses rush out.  Even first-timers, if they get the chance to be dumped, can tell you they felt the drag of every millisecond.  Then, once you’re compressed, there’s no more thinking.  Which leads to the other major discrepancy between qualocryo ads and fact: being qualodumped and untanked is _nothing_ like waking up.  When you get dumped in a Gauntlet, the fucking thing is still frozen.  You’re still incapable of vital bodily processes, much less _thought_ processes.  And even when you’re finally thawed out and cognizant, it isn’t like being shaken awake.  Since there’s no thinking in qualocompression oblivion, there sure as hell isn’t any dreaming.  No _subjective_ time has passed, but now you’re in a different body, a body that isn’t _quite _under your control for the first twenty-four hours, like it’s running on dial-up internet.

_The Mirror_ is, arguably, for most people, the worst part of the qualocryo process.  After an hour of the Squires checking to see if you’ve been dumped correctly and have some steering power over your Gauntlet, you get wheeled into a bathroom.  Arthur doesn’t know if being naked makes it better or worse—after _being_ your own body, it’s potentially traumatic to find yourself a different age or nationality or, God forbid, gender.  But whether or not you’re ready for it, the Squires help you stand up, let you have a look over yourself.  Arthur doesn’t need help.  Shrugging off the Squire’s loose grip from his shoulder, he understands why.  His Gauntlet is fit, young.  Blonde and blue-eyed.  But Arthur’s never cared about how he looks.  It’s someone else’s face—what pride can he take from that?

 

“Well.  Huh.  This is convenient, hmm?  Getting qualodumped into a Gauntlet with the same name as you, I mean.  Or maybe just ironic?”

Arthur, seated in a leather, winged armchair, stares at the waifish woman standing casually behind the large oak desk with her back to him, silhouetted by the hazy, afternoon light flooding through the panoramic windows.  It’s now his thirty-fourth time out of qualocryo, but some parts of the process are sickeningly repetitive: he gets pulled from the tank in a lab hidden in the second or third basement level like some twenty-first century horror film about illicit cloning; he gets escorted up two, three dozen storeys in the opulent kind of  skyscraper with titanium-tinted windows he was used to aiming at; he gets stuck with a post-DUT therapist, who is inevitably a woman in her thirties and would be attractive if Arthur could overlook the fact that her only job is to tell him his ‘lifespan’ in the Gauntlet.

“This is fucking ridiculous.”

She turns to him then, her features set in a frown.

“Is it?  ‘Arthur’ isn’t an uncommon name.”

He lurches out of the chair and begins pacing the length of the Persian rug, unable to discern whether he or his new body is restless.

“You can’t even call this body a First-Gen Gauntlet,” he grinds out.  “The kid, Arthur Penta—Peven—”

“Arthur Pendragon,” she supplies blithely.

“_Pendragon_,” he corrects himself.  “The kid, Arthur Pendragon, he wasn’t dead, wasn’t even a _veg_ when you had me dumped!  I can’t use his body with him _still in here_.”

Arthur knows his arguments are useless.  Pendragon Senior must have doled as much money _under_ the table as he had with his signature _over_ it because Arthur knows this DUT was in no way legal.

One of her perfectly plucked eyebrows twitches, before she asks, “What makes you think Arthur Pendragon is ‘still in there’?  _That_ is—ah, how did you put it?—fucking ridiculous of you, Arthur.”

He stops his pacing to stare at her again, and he feels his lips automatically pull back in a sneer, the sensation of it in the facial muscles oddly familiar.  Maybe it was a reflex expression for Arthur Pendragon, he muses.

“The Squire who untanked me said he’d been in cryo eighteen months for ‘medical reasons.’  That means, even though he was _frozen_, he was—is—still alive, you sick fucks.”

“I assure you,” the woman says, tone clipped and impatient, “being dumped in Arthur Pendragon’s body will be no different than your previous experiences in Gauntlets—hallucinations that are really memories, unexplained urges, nothing out of the ordinary for a qualocryo veteran like you.  You’re very much yourself in there, and you couldn’t ask for a better Gauntlet for this assignment.  He’s twenty one and in perfect health.  And, anyway,” she pauses to give him a half-pitying, half-pleading look, “Uther insisted his son’s body be used.”

Arthur can’t remember ever being in a Gauntlet with the possibility that the original ‘inhabitant’ was still alive somewhere in the recesses of the mind he’s now operating like his own.  It’s the first time Arthur feels guilty, feels like an intruder.  It’s the first time he’s wary of damaging the body he’s been given.  Still, he signs his release forms (thirty pages of fine print, really, of which he’s only forced himself to read a couple) assuring all legal, ethical, and medical boards that he was fully informed within forty-eight hours of being untanked that—yeah, repetitive.


	3. If You Can't Beat Them

Normally, after getting an OK from the shrink, Arthur’s escorted to an unmarked conference room in the same building to meet with his new employer.  In the beginning, his “clientele” was made up exclusively of politicians.  Then, perhaps by word of empty promising, mudslinging mouth, leaders of industry grew the bollocks to have him dumped: infiltrate _this_ manufacturer’s headquarters and steal their technology since we don’t have it, or fuck up _this _company’s stocks and leadership by putting the CEO’s only son in a coma, or figure out where my wife, that bitch, is draining all _my_ money into.  _Normally_, they quickly compromise on the form and amount of payment, discuss any accommodations he foresees needing, sign even more papers, then they depart separately, _normally_ with Arthur being provided with a mobile (just in case) and a Jaguar (his vehicle of choice).

His current situation started _ab_normally—bloody sharing a body, the fuck.  Still is.

Instead, the shrink leads him to the lifts and tells him to go down to the lobby.

“Coming with?”

He doesn’t expect her to, not really anyway, but it would be her job—along with his head—on the line if he chose to stray.  He must not have as much control over his features as he thought, because she answers with a serene,

“I’ll be watching to make sure you get to the ground level.”

The doors of the lift close, and the last he sees of her is a smirk.

The twenty-two storey descent is uneventful, Arthur never once being joined by another person, but he takes some pleasure from the utter mundane feeling of _riding a lift_, humming tunelessly along with Debussy and further studying his appearance in the meticulously polished mirror walls of the lift.  Arthur Pendragon is built like a Greek god, all taut, sculpted muscle, and topped with a crown of warm golden hair, cut for manageability and to match the regal angles of his face, the strong jaw and straight nose, the skin smooth save for the subtle frown between the brows and crinkles at the corners of his eyes, which are a transparent blue.  The custom-tailored, fussily coordinated outfit—a long-sleeved polo worn under a cotton jumper, pressed twill slacks, buttery leather oxfords—soften the boy’s athletic form, but Arthur only thinks he looks like a stiff upper-lipped ponce.

The lift chimes its arrival and Arthur steps out into the high-ceilinged atrium.  He hasn’t taken more than a few steps across the glinting, waxed granite floor when he’s flanked by someone.  He stops walking; the stranger mimics him.

“The fuck?”

The man—slightly older than Pendragon Junior but of the same build, dressed in a three-piece suit, dark-blonde hair slicked back—just smiles politely.

“Leon,” he says, holding out his hand.

Arthur sneers, again finding the expression comforting.  Seemingly unbothered, ‘Leon’ lets his hand fall with the tiniest of shrugs.

“I’ve been sent by Uther Pendragon to collect you.”

Arthur feels the sneer falter for a moment before recovering with a, “Don’t know what you’re getting at, mate, sorry.”

It’s a stupid thing to say, really.  Uther Pendragon, with the amount of money Arthur’s already guessed at, would—on pain of death, probably—make sure the ‘collection’ of his investment was perfect.  Arthur’s escort would, of course, know what they are doing.

“I’m Uther Pendragon’s personal assistant, and I’ve known Arthur Pendragon since he was in uni.”

Or that.

“You’re him,” he adds unnecessarily, still composed and smiling.

He knows he’s defeated, but it doesn’t stop Arthur from feeling the need to emphasize a certain, key point:

“I’m Arthur, but I’m _not_ Arthur Pendragon.”

 

Leon, it turns out, is easy to get along with—perhaps a bit compliant, a bit pensive, and a lot blunt, but nonetheless amicable.  He even offers Arthur the wheel at the Range Rover, saying, ‘I’m knackered, driving out here from the estate, and there’s GPS anyhow,’ but Arthur kindly, if only a touch reluctantly, denies, which is how Arthur ends up sitting in the passenger seat (another oddity: who invites a mercenary so close?) for the next hour, listening to Led Zeppelin cover-bands and testing the waters with questions.  Arthur manages to eke out some information concerning Pendragon Senior:

Uther, age sixty-six years, makes his annual £17 billion1 in dividends from Pendragon Enterprises, the international defense technology company he founded eleven years ago (in 2562, a year after Arthur was last put in qualopress, explaining why he knows nothing of the lombard) and of which he is the CEO.  Though he is a permanent denizen of London, he also spends a fair amount of time at his country estate in Winchester, Hampshire2, the same being Arthur and Leon’s destination.  The man is married to his work (or rather his money and prestige), having become a widower at his son’s birth.

Arthur finds this last bit particularly interesting.  The shrink said Uther requested Arthur be dumped in Junior’s body, but you’d think, in spite of everything he owned, the man would be more careful with his one and only pup.

“Why was Junior in cryo?”

He doesn’t expect an answer, _not really_ anyway, but Leon (partially) humors him with a solemn,

“An attempt at his and Morgana’s lives.  Morgana was kidnapped, so I suppose it’s lucky he only needed some cryo time.”

Arthur grunts noncommittally, watching the castles and cathedrals of Winchester blaze by and wondering how any of it was still standing, let alone the town.

“What makes the old man so sure his niece is still alive?”

As if by chance, Leon evades the question by pulling up a driveway, the wrought iron gate automatically parting to receive them.  Having expected a drive through the woods to some secluded fortress, Arthur is surprised to see that Uther’s estate—a modest two-storey mansion sitting in the middle of a few acres of land—is only just outside the town’s eastern limits.  Leon parks the Range Rover behind a Rolls-Royce Spectre3 at the top of the circular driveway (Arthur’s also surprised by the lack of a gilded fountain).  The two men disembark, and Leon throws Arthur a bemused grin across the hood of the vehicle.

Arthur guesses at the reason for it, and forestalls the escort with a half-snide, “I’m no bird.  I can get out of a car on my own.”

Leon, _still smiling_, gives another tiny shrug and cocks his head in the direction of the mansion, Arthur answering with his own shrug.  Together, they take the few bone-white marble steps to the oak door.

“I hope you don’t mind my getting the door,” Leon says delicately

Ignoring Arthur’s eye-roll of ‘if you must,’ the personal assistant approaches the retinal scanner installed in the façade where a doorbell would’ve been.  The door silently swings open, and Leon sweeps an arm in invitation.

Compared to its pleasant exterior of rust-red bricks and elegant Greco-Roman pillars and untrimmed hedges, the mansion’s interior is strikingly Spartan: the grand foyer features large arches in either lateral wall—through one Arthur sees a dining room, through the other a library; a marble staircase that fans at the first landing into two separate staircases to reach the second floor; the opposite wall made entirely of windows for what appears to be both storeys and displaying the large expanse of manicured grass behind the mansion, and farther, the beginnings of a thick wood at the edge of the estate.  The walls are bare, and Arthur mentally chides himself—had he been expecting framed photographs of Pendragon Junior playing football or larger-than-life-sized portraits of Pendragon Senior?  But he finds he’s disappointed by the missing chandelier.

“Unless he otherwise instructs,” Leon says, drawing Arthur’s attention back to the task at hand, “you will refer to Uther Pendragon as ‘sir’ when speaking to him.”

“Would that be proper?” Arthur asks in mock-concern, though he can’t help his grimace.  “Shouldn’t I call him _Father_?”

Leon merely grins.  “And please avoid sarcasm.”

 

Having your qualocryo disc removed takes two seconds; disliking Uther Pendragon takes less than.  Leon led Arthur to Uther’s study at the far-west end of the second level, where the man stood waiting, peering out the windows behind his desk and greeted the two of them with a brisk,

“I was beginning to think I was wasting my time and money.”

After a perfunctory ‘Sir,’ Leon bowed out of the room, leaving Arthur in his present state, seething just inside the door and staring at the mogul’s back.

“Seeing as how I’m under your employ, you could do me the courtesy of properly introducing yourself,” Arthur bites out.  Then, thinking it better not to test _these_ waters so soon, he adds a belated, “Sir.”

The older man does so, if only to smile coldly at Arthur.  Looking past the steel-grey hair, hardened eyes and faintly etched lines—all signs of age or experience or both—, Arthur notes the resemblance between Pendragons Senior and Junior.

“Since we’ve established _you_ are under _my_ employ,” the man says, tone serious and all business, “let us also agree that we’ve no need for formalities.  We’re both professionals—of sorts.  ‘Uther’ will do.”

“In that case, _Uther_,” Arthur says, approaching the desk and sitting in the only chair uninvited, “perhaps you’d like to tell me why I’ve been dragged to the English countryside to discuss my employ.  I’m of the understanding you operate in London.  Surely, it would’ve been more convenient to meet at the qualocryo facility.”

Uther settles into the chair on his side of the desk, resting an elbow on the aged woodwork to cradle his jaw in his palm.  He studies Arthur critically for several moments before answering.

“Privacy.”

He doesn’t elaborate, so Arthur raises an eyebrow.

“You’ve already been informed, I take it, of the incident that resulted in my niece’s abduction and my son’s injury.”

“Nothing specific,” Arthur says, looking about the room, which is as sparsely furnished as the other rooms he’s glimpsed—no photos, rugs, drapes; just the desk with a chair on either side.  This room, at least, has a chandelier, albeit an iron, skeletal one.

“I won’t feign modesty: I’m a wealthy man,” Uther drawls.  “But that does not exempt me from unforgiving, inevitable age.”

Arthur waves his hand in a vague gesture.  “Don’t men like you just have themselves dumped into younger Gauntlets so they can keep the reins for another lifetime or two?”

Uther sits up then, expression severe, wrinkles deepening, and presses his fingertips to the tabletop in a defensive stance.  Apparently, Arthur’s assumption was highly insulting.

“I’ve more honor than that,” the man growls.  “The idea is reprehensible.  My colleagues, friendly or otherwise, are aware of how I feel.  Naturally, my potential successors were targeted.”

Arthur resists the urge to roll his eyes.

“So, like I was asking Leon,” he says, tearing his gaze from the man’s emphatically challenging one, “what makes you think your niece is still alive for me to find her?  It’s been eighteen months.”

Uther tugs open a drawer, digs through it, but Arthur can still feel the lombard’s empty, slate-blue eyes on him despite how intently he was studying the barren walls.  Peripherally, Arthur catches Uther sliding something across the desk.  Just for something else to focus on, Arthur turns and finds it’s a stack of laserdiscs beside a sheet of paper.

“Records of Morgana’s qualocryo disc,” Uther provides without preamble.  “There’s been consistent activity for the past year and a half.”

Arthur grimaces.  “You’re telling me,” he grits, “you had your niece fitted with a _tagged qualo disc_ in the body she was _born_ in?”

Shoving the contract closer to Arthur, Uther answers, coolly, “Purely as a safety precaution.  My son’s body has one as well.”

“Don’t you mean ‘had’?”

“Not at all.  Both discs—yours and his—are currently implanted in his body.”

His hand stops mid-air, about to yank the papers from the desk, and Arthur gapes at the older man.

“The—_what the fuck_?”

The expletive makes one of Uther’s eyebrows twitch, but he goes on to say, “You’ll be using what he knows to find Morgana and their attackers.  You’ll be paid £6 million now, have a budget of £6 million during, and receive £12 million at the end of four months.  Should you remain empty handed at that time, we shall renegotiate.  However, I have been told of your efficiency and hope to not be bothered with that outcome.”

He holds out a fountain pen, the contract already at the edge of Arthur’s side of the desk.

This is bullshit.  Fucking insane.  The antichrist must have visited in the last twelve years while Arthur was shelved.  Arthur takes the pen and signs his name (yeah, mononym that it is) beside Uther Pendragon’s.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Obviously, I've no idea how much the UK Pound will be worth 500+ years in the future, and it doesn't help that I've only ever used US Dollars... so, I just made up obnoxiously HUGE numbers.  
> 2\. I also know nothing of the English countryside.  
> 3\. Rolls-Royce has a penchant for naming automobiles after dead things, so I'm just upholding the legacy, I suppose.  
> 4\. If you've gotten this far, a gracious thank you!


	4. Friends Will Be Friends

As soon as the nib leaves the paper, Uther snatches the contract from the desk and reburies it in the drawer with one hand, and presents Arthur with a credit strip with the other.  Correctly interpreting this as his dismissal, Arthur takes the credit strip and stands.  Though he crosses to the door and opens it wordlessly, he turns back, hand on the (what appears to be) platinum, dragon claw-shaped handle, and jerks his head in a sort-of bow.

“_Sir._”

He doesn’t wait for Uther’s reaction.

Having shut the door loud enough to be deemed rude, he finds Leon leaning heavily against a nearby patch of mahogany wall, arms crossed and dozing.

“Get paid to nap?”

The assistant’s eyes snap open, and he shoulders himself off of the wall while forcing a yawn through his nose.

“What The Dragon doesn’t know won’t get me sacked,” he says, half-brightly, half-guiltily.  Then, “I’m to take you to your accommodations now.”

During the hour-long drive back to London, Arthur again in the passenger seat of the Range Rover, Leon provides him with greater detail of ‘The Dragon’s’ predicament, with minor interruptions from the mercenary: eighteen months ago, several of Britain’s defense companies—most notably BAe Systems, SELEX Galileo, Boeing, Logica1, and, undeniably, Pendragon Enterprises—met for a small gala in The Dorchester’s Orchid Hall2 (‘You call that small?’), which his son and niece were obligated to attend.  Afterwards, Uther permitted his son and niece to wander round Soho.  Once there, however, Junior and Morgana gave their escorts the slip (‘_Permission_?  _Chaperones_?  Christ, they’re in their twenties!’).

A mere _half hour _later, the disc-monitoring facility sent Uther an alert that his son’s vital signs had changed drastically due to extensive blood loss.  Unfortunately, the tagging capabilities of neither Junior’s nor Morgana’s discs include GPS (‘Oh, because the lombard thought tracking would be taking it _too _far, yeah?’), and so it took an infinitely long ten minutes for the feds to recover Junior’s body—_four_ close-range gunshot wounds to the left side of his chest—in Fitzrovia, and to discover Morgana—though physically unharmed from what the disc monitors could gather—had sublimated.

Every investigative agency, with _and_ without the persuasion of Uther’s money, struggled with the case for six months.  Those six months produced only two conclusive facts: that Morgana is still alive, and that the job was carried out by the most skilled of professionals or the most determined.  Or both.  Because _sublimated_ is precisely what the lombard’s niece had done: all traces of her had been ripped from the city’s databases.  Records of credit strip-use, videos from close-circuit cameras, even fingerprints from lavatory door handles had simply disappeared.

“The bastards can’t be _that_ skilled if they only managed to put Junior in critical condition,” Arthur muses aloud as Leon drives past Buckingham Palace.

“Which makes the whole thing stranger,” Leon replies, taking the Brook Gate turn on Park Lane3.  “There are plenty of people with motive and means, but Uther was never contacted regarding a ransom.  They just injured Arthur and took Morgana.”

The Range Rover eases to a stop.  Arthur blinks at their location before turning to scowl at the other man.

“You’re fucking joking.”

Leon, being Leon, just smiles.

A prompt four minutes (and thirty-six seconds) later, Arthur and Leon are having afternoon tea in the sitting room of The Dorchester Hotel’s Audley roof suite.  Or rather, Leon is gorging himself on coffee and poncey finger sandwiches and clotted cream-smothered scones while Arthur paces to and from the balcony door.

“You’re making me anxious,” Leon garbles _un_-anxiously through a mouthful of macaroons.  “Why don’t you eat?  Or sit down at least.  Uther’s practically bought the suite for your four month stay in three-dimensional land.”

Arthur stops his annoyed pacing to rub the toe of his oxford against the silk-lined wall beside the fireplace.

“With the ‘budget’ he gave me I could’ve rented some small place in Fitzrovia.  Then I’d be nearer the ‘scene of the crime.’  Assuming that’s his joke making me stay here.  Then again, he’s probably just flaunting his account at me.”

Leon shrugs absently.

“He said you could leave if you wanted.  But, just so you know, _he _knows your disc is tagged with a GPS locator.”

The assistant stands then, draining the coffee dregs from his mug, and dusts crumbs from his neatly trimmed beard and off his pressed, silk trousers.  He briefly grabs Arthur’s shoulder before leaving with a chuckled,

“Thanks for the nibbles.”

 

For the lack of anything else to do, Arthur spends a fruitless half hour combing the suite for bugging devices, reminding himself every so often that Uther fucking Pendragon doesn’t need bugging devices to keep track of what he does.  Still, he turns over cushions and peeks under the furniture and runs his fingernails along the seams of the wall molds.  He then wastes another half hour in the shower.  For the first twenty-five minutes, he rants internally about the wealthy population’s ridiculous need for televisions in the bathroom; for the remaining five, he examines the damage, or lack thereof, to Arthur Pendragon’s body.  The left half of his torso is completely smooth and unscarred, if only a little tender.  The reconstructive surgeons pre-cryo did a good job, though, with Uther’s money, it would be lawfully punishable if they hadn’t.

Arthur Pendragon’s sneer is once again in place when the _actually_ cognizant Arthur finds nothing but suits and wool jumpers and neckties, all prearranged in ensembles, in the suite’s dressing room.  He mentally notes to use his £6 million to buy t-shirts, jeans, and trainers.  In the meantime, he settles for the only short-sleeve polo and (mercifully) cotton dress pants—making sure to toss the matching scarf into the fireplace on his way out the door.

He takes the stairs down to the Promenade, but once there, he realizes he _still_ has nothing to do.  He throws himself onto a chartreuse-leather chaise to come up with his options.  First, he could check out the Orchid Hall.  But he already knows he won’t find anything there.  Second, he could get hold of a computer and hunt for Morgana’s missing information.  But he’s never been close to fair with hacking—give him a potentially lethal object and he’ll make do; ask for anything more than getting through security systems and he was helpless.  Third, he could pound pavement and nose around Soho.  But with Junior’s face, that’s only begging for trouble like a one-legged whore.

He pinches the bridge of his nose, praying for patience, but he can’t help the tapping of his toes.  He still can’t tell which ‘Arthur’ is so bloody restless, which makes him even more frustrated.  Now that it’s a fact the both of them are in a single body, Arthur feels especially confined—by Senior’s contract and by Junior’s internal presence.  It’s a small consolation that Junior hasn’t ‘woken up’ yet.  It would be a new qualodump experience for him, but Arthur isn’t looking forward to it.

“—agon?”

“Mm?”

“Monsieur Pendragon?”

Arthur sits up, uncharacteristically startled, and finally notices the hotel concierge standing politely beside him.

“Shit, sorry.  You mean me.”

Unfazed, the concierge presents him with a silver serving tray.

“I was instructed to give you these.”

Arthur takes up the valet tag and unsealed envelope.  The concierge doesn’t wait for a tip.  Shrugging, he extracts the messily handwritten note:

  
_Café Au Lait_

_46 Fife Road, KT1 1SU4_

_   
_5:30_   
_

_-M_

 

‘Follow directions from a stranger’ isn’t on Arthur’s short list of options, but he has to admit it would probably be a lot more productive and interesting.  He heads for the revolving door at the hotel entrance.  And, it turns out Uther isn’t as cruel as Arthur first thought when the valet pulls up in a black Jaguar XSR5 coupe, and the twenty-minute drive into Kingston upon Thames is exhilarating though far too short.  He finds the specified café easily enough and takes the street stall immediately outside.  He sits in the parked car, watching the sidewalk traffic.  There are still ten minutes until the rendezvous time, and he wonders if he’ll manage to pick out the note-sender.  But, now that he has time to think, perhaps it isn’t the best of ideas after all.

He gets out of the Jaguar and takes the three, four steps across the pavement to the café door.

“I’ve got it.”

Arthur shrugs, hardly sparing a glance at the guy holding the door, and enters.  He settles himself into one of the chairs at the window table.

“A ‘thank you’ would’ve been nice.”

It’s the same voice, so it must be the guy from the door who sits across from him.  Staring at the stranger, the first things Arthur thinks are: _ears_, blue eyes, cheekbones, ebony-and-ivory, ridiculous bandana, lanky.

“I guess nothing changes much in a year.”

Next: _fucking idiot_.

“I’m not the Pendragon kid,” Arthur grinds out, hiding his fists beneath the table.

“Oh, that’s a shame,” the intruder goes on, unperturbed.  “Bloke still owes me six-hundred quid—”

“Who _the fuck_ are you?”

The stranger blinks once before chuckling to himself and offering a pale, long-fingered hand across the table.

“Merlin.  Believe it or not, but I’m ‘the Pendragon kid’s’ best friend.”

 

“You’re right, I don’t believe you.”

Merlin laughs, then flags a waitress and orders two hazelnut lattes, each with an extra shot of espresso.

“Don’t be a prat,” Merlin chides.  “I sent you that note.”

“How would _you_ know I was at The Dorchester?” Arthur grumbles.  Then, feeling more flustered than he would ever dare to admit, “And what makes you think I want a hazelnut latte?”

“We always get hazelnut lattes,” Merlin says with a small frown.

Arthur digs the heel of his palm into his brow just above his right eye before pointing a hopefully menacing finger in Merlin’s face.

“_We _don’t know each other,” he corrects stubbornly.  “I’ve known you for less than five minutes.  And I don’t drink bloody _hazelnut lattes_—ah, thank you.”

The waitress places their mugs on the table, Arthur’s perhaps a little harder than she needs to, and leaves before they can ask for anything more.

“Brilliantly done,” Merlin laughs.  “Just because you’ve only known me for five minutes doesn’t change the fact that I’ve known Arthur for years now.  And drink the damn latte, I’m paying.”

“Not until you tell me how you knew I was at the hotel.”

Merlin peers at Arthur over his mug, expression unreadable.  He carefully lowers the mug after a tentative sip, and Arthur catches himself watching the other man lick foam from the corner of his mouth.  Arthur blinks, shakes his head (hopefully) inconspicuously, but Merlin’s lips stretch into a slow smile.

“I’ve been tracking Arthur’s disc.”

“What are you talking about?”

Merlin pulls his mobile from his jeans pocket, and Arthur is tempted to ask him what generation iPhone6 it is, until Merlin starts jabbering and reciting.

“Arthur’s disc was inactive, frozen in his body, for the past year and a half. Until today: 12:42 p.m., City of London cryo facility; 1:30 p.m., London to Uther’s manor in Winchester; 2:56 p.m., Winchester to Mayfair; 5:02 p.m., Mayfair to Kingston.”

Arthur holds out his hand, relieved to find it steady, and says, “Just so we’re clear: you have a GPS locator on Arthur Pendragon’s disc when his _father_ doesn’t?”

Merlin shrugs, the movement more graceful than Arthur expects with those bony shoulders, and explains, “Arthur asked me to do it in uni—that’s how we know each other, by the way.  He said it’s safer for me to do it than for some public monitoring company.”

Arthur withdraws his hand and takes up the latte without thinking, mind too occupied with this new information.  When he places it back down though, he realizes the taste really was pleasantly comfortable on his palate.  Merlin chuckles, soft and low, and Arthur quickly shoots him a questioning glare.

“I _told _you you’d like it,” Merlin lilts. Then, “So.”

“What?”

“You know who I am.  Sort of.  But who are you, if you’re not Arthur?”

Arthur groans, his fingers itching to throttle the bandana-draped neck of the other man.  Instead, he exhales loudly through his nose and answers with forced calm.

“My _name _is Arthur, but I’m not Pendragon Junior.  His father’s hired me for the next four months to find Marl—Mern—”

“Do you mean Morgana?” Merlin asks, his head cocked in amusement.

“Fuck, Morgana, Christ.  Anyway, Uther’s loaning me Junior’s body for the next four months to find her or whoever took her.”

Merlin drains his mug, swipes foam from his top lip with the back of his hand, and stands.  He offers Arthur his hand once again.

“So, Arthur who isn’t Arthur Pendragon, when do we start?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. I love Wikipedia...  
> 2\. It gave me British defense companies and one of London's most expensive hotels.  
> 3\. I also love Google Maps.  
> 4\. Ditto.  
> 5\. Made-up car. I'm sure Jaguars will live to see the year 2562.  
> 6\. As will the iPhone.  
> 7\. Aren't you glad Merlin's finally been introduced? (I couldn't wait.) And again, if you've somehow made it this far, a huge _huge_ HUGE Thank You!


	5. Friends Will Be Friends Will Be Friends...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bit shorter than the previous chapters, but I hope the shenanigans make up for that. AND...

“What makes you think you’ll be of any use to me?”

It’s too late for the answer to mean anything, considering Merlin is sitting in Arthur’s passenger seat and giving directions to his flat in Surbiton.  Still, Arthur thinks he should put up some resistance since he gave none when the other man followed him out of the café and into his car.

“This is it,” Merlin says, indicating a small, brick apartment.  “No garage, I’m afraid.  But your gift from Daddy should be safe on the street.”

Arthur gives a token roll of his eyes before stepping out of the Jaguar.  Merlin does the same, then tosses him a set of keys—actual, metal, toothed keys; no magnetic strips—over the top of the car.

“2E,” he says.  “You can figure out which one goes in the lock yourself, yeah?”

“Trust me in your home, Merlin?”

The brunette holds up a pack of cigarettes and corrects Arthur, saying, “I’ll be up in a few.  I’m sure you won’t get too lonely, and I haven’t anything worth stealing.”

Arthur watches his new companion pace the empty sidewalk, smoke billowing around him like an acrid amoeba, before turning on his heel and approaching the building where he finds the main door unlocked.  He takes the concrete stairs to the second storey, and Merlin’s unit is the closest to the stairwell.  Rather than bothering with matching the metal of the lock in the doorknob with the metals of the keys, he correctly chooses the most worn of the keys and lets himself into the flat.

The door immediately opens into a combination of sitting room, dining room and kitchen.  He pads over to the short hallway, at the end of which he sees a closed door—probably the bedroom, going by the posters stapled on most of the wooden surface—and before that two open doors opposite each other—probably a spare bedroom and the loo.  It’s nowhere near the size of his suite at The Dorchester, but it’s definitely more welcoming, and even more so than Uther’s mansion.

Arthur wanders back into the living room, making a beeline for the entertainment center.  The television and connected sound system and media consoles are possibly the most expensive things in the flat.  He throws himself into one of the mismatched pieces of furniture (a red, leather reclining chair) and carelessly scoops up a picture frame from the end table.  It takes a heartbeat or two for him to realize he’s looking at a photo of Merlin and himself—no, of Merlin and _Arthur Pendragon_—arms slung across each other’s shoulders and toasting the person behind the camera with plastic drinking cups.  Maybe the idiot wasn’t lying after all.

But when he places the photo onto the coffee table, Arthur finds that his hand is shaking so the metal frame clanks against the glass surface.  He stares at his hand curiously.  It isn’t exactly unexpected; it’s only just over five hours he’s been out of the tank, so Junior’s body must be exhausted.  But then an odd twisting in his gut and tightening in his chest join the trembling in his fingers.

_Fuck_.  This isn’t exhaustion.  And the only person he’s been in contact with is—

“Could’ve closed the door, yeah?”

—_Merlin._

Arthur is out of his seat and across the flat before Merlin has a chance to shut his door.  With his left hand, Arthur slams the door closed; with his right, he grabs Merlin’s right wrist and wrenches at the rest of his arm to force his elbow, effectively pinning him in a hammerlock and shoving his chest against the door.

“What the fuck!”

Arthur just drags the bony wrist farther up Merlin’s back and leans into the side of Merlin’s face, growling dangerously low, “At the café.  You fucking dosed me.”

Merlin stops squirming, though only for long enough to yell, “I’ve no fucking idea what you’re saying,” and to throw a wildly-aimed elbow into Arthur’s ribs.  There isn’t a lot of strength behind it, but it catches Arthur off guard and his fingers loosen on Merlin’s wrist as he instinctively folds in on himself.  Merlin capitalizes on this, ripping his wrist completely out of Arthur’s grip and using the momentum to pivot and swing his fist into Arthur’s left temple.  Arthur staggers backwards a couple steps but, seeing Merlin’s arm still extended across his chest, takes him by the wrist and elbow and yanks, using the motion to pull himself upright and launch his knee into Merlin’s abdomen.

Merlin crumples to the floor then, holding up both his hands in surrender and gasping, “Arthur, mate—shit, look—I honestly have no clue—_buggering fuck_—what you’re talking about—doping you, or—whatever.”

“There’s something wrong,” Arthur pants, gesturing uselessly at his own torso.  “In my chest, my stomach.  When I got here.”

Merlin looks up at him, looking exasperated even through his wince, and his voice is mostly composed when he says, “D’you really think I would _drug_ you then let you _drive me home_?  Even I’m not that stupid.”

Cradling the left side of his chest, Arthur stares down at Merlin and grudgingly accepts that he has a point.  Arthur reaches down a hand in offering, which Merlin takes (if only a tiny bit reluctantly), and hoists him up with a muttered,

“Sorry, er, for going off like that.”

Grinning wryly, Merlin just says, “S’pose I should’ve known Arthur had it in him to do that.  Anyway, how ‘bout a drink?”

 

Two hours, a nearly-full bottle of whiskey, and six-seven-eight beers each later, Arthur and Merlin are now fast friends, much the same way schoolyard children form alliances after the initial scuffle, laughing at bathroom televisions and metal keys and hazelnut lattes and gorgeous women working in offices and butlers eating macaroons.  It isn’t until Arthur glimpses the same photograph of Merlin and Junior that the haze of alcohol clears somewhat and he realizes he still doesn’t know what he was doing in Merlin’s flat.

“Whoa, all right, there?” Merlin slurs when Arthur stands suddenly.

Arthur stares at him sharply.

“I’m supposed to be looking for Mrytle—Madonna—fuck, _that girl_ and her kidnappers, not getting chummy over drinks with—with _you_.”

Merlin waves his beer bottle, seemingly missing the backhanded insult, and says, “I _told_ you, didn’t I?  That’s why I brought you here.  I’m going to help you.  But if you ask me,” Merlin continues, sounding increasingly wound up, “Morgana only has herself to blame.  Getting _kidnapped_, or however Uther puts it, just because she has a weak spot for you.”

He points his bottle accusatorily in Arthur’s general direction, and Arthur sits back down beside Merlin on the couch.

“What are you on about?”

“She had to be all _noble_, when we all know you can take care of yourself, eh, Arthur?” Merlin gurgles, patting Arthur’s shoulder.

“_Merlin_, what the _fuck_ are you talking about?”

In answer, Merlin half-giggles, half-hiccups, slumps against the back of the couch, and decidedly—falls asleep.  Arthur grinds the heel of his oxford into the side of Merlin’s combat boot.  When the slighter man only snuffles, Arthur kicks Merlin’s shin.

“Oi, fuck!” Merlin yelps, sloshing some of his beer onto the floor.

Arthur just smirks.

“Oh, don’t worry about helping me, Merlin,” he coos derisively. “You go ahead and sleep while I nab your telly and speakers and blu-ray.  Should fetch enough money to buy some information.”

Merlin gives a hollow laugh before saying, “Mate, no amount of money will buy the griff you need.”

“Well, then?” Arthur snarls, throwing up his arms in defeat.

“All right, all right,” Merlin mutters, setting down his beer bottle and standing unsteadily.  “I’ll make some coffee or something.”

Arthur stands as well then jerks a thumb in the direction of the hall.

“Get some cold water on your face,” he orders.  “I’ll make the damn coffee.”

Both Merlin’s eyebrows shoot up his forehead as he stares at Arthur, eyes blurred from alcohol and confusion.

“You.  Make coffee.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Arthur grumbles.  “I’m not some spoiled poofter like Junior.  I can bloody well make two cups of coffee.”

“Okay, all right,” Merlin says again with a shrug before heading for the bathroom as instructed.  “I’ll be in my bedroom, yeah?”

Arthur watches his pseudo-comrade stagger down the short stretch of hallway and into the door to the left.  When sounds of the tap running drift from the lav, he heads to the small kitchen.  It doesn’t take long to find the coffee (instant, but he isn’t particularly surprised), kettle and two mugs (mismatched like everything else Merlin owns).  Like riding in the lift at the cryo facility—which now seems like ages ago when really it’s only been seven hours—_making instant coffee_ feels pleasantly, eerily normal.  He finds himself stirring the grounds in time with his humming of Led Zeppelin and vaguely registers the slamming of one door and the creaking of another.  Figuring the coffee won’t dissolve any further, he takes up both mugs and makes his way to Merlin’s bedroom.

The poster-dressed door is ajar, and Arthur shoulders it open.  At first, he thinks he’s chosen the wrong door when he sees only clutter, rubbish, and more clutter.  But then he spots Merlin lying with his back to the door amid piles of clothes and books on the mattress which is set directly on the floor in the far corner of the room beneath the large, intersecting windows.  Arthur toes Merlin’s belongings off of the mattress to clear a seat for himself.  The mattress groans its disapproval when Arthur sits on the newly-exposed edge, and he sets the mugs on the emptiest patch of floor.  And none too soon, it seems, when his hands start shaking once again.  He groans inwardly, wondering when it—and the renewed uncomfortable writhing sensation in his chest—would stop.

To draw his attention elsewhere, Arthur peers down at the prostrate man.  Lying the way he is—one arm cradling his neck like an impromptu pillow, the other arm draped over his knees which are drawn up to his chest—Merlin looks more like a child than a man.  But then Arthur takes in the heavy and obviously-worn combat boots (which the idiot didn’t arse himself to remove) and faintly discernable growth of stubble on the angular jaw and suddenly he can’t make up his mind.

Feeling momentarily disconnected from his body, Arthur watches as his hand drifts toward the bandana tied round Merlin’s neck.  His fingers catch on the fabric and one, two heartbeats later, his mind finally catches up and he quickly drops his hand to Merlin’s shoulder and shakes it roughly.

“Get up, you chuffing lightweight.”

“I’m not a lightweight,” Merlin mumbles, swatting at Arthur’s hand.  “I’m just tired from you working me so hard.”

Arthur doesn’t know why, but he tousles Merlin’s already-messy hair with an unknown burst of affection for the pale, willowy man.  Merlin rolls onto his back and smiles crookedly, bemusedly at him.

“Which Arthur is doing that?”

“I don’t know.”

And like that, the moment’s gone.  Arthur tears his hand away from Merlin’s dark, unruly locks to shove it deep in his trouser pocket and clears his throat awkwardly.

“So, now that you’re awake, let’s get to work, yeah?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AND... If you've made it this far with me on my out-of-control cyberpunk!Merlin journey, how about a small treat? The first person to point out (by way of comment!) my pattern for title chapters gets a Merthur drabble! :D Shouldn't be too difficult. And this way, I don't get too far drawn into my own insane universe.


	6. A Kind Of Magic

It takes twenty minutes and three cups of grotty instant coffee (all obediently made by Arthur) for Merlin to regain enough lucidity to assemble his hardware, sometimes muttering curses at himself or the wires or the heavy equipment, sometimes shooting dark looks at Arthur tramping about his room uselessly.  Then finally—after another six minutes, fifty-two seconds and cup and a half—Merlin gives a triumphant ‘Cheers!’ and throws Arthur a smug grin while sweeping his arms in a bow.  Merlin’s desk, the only piece of furniture in his room aside from the frameless bed and paint-chipped wardrobe, is now overrun by three computer systems.

“Isn’t data _reconnaissance_ rather conspicuous if it eats up half of the borough’s electricity?”

Arthur means to sound unimpressed, but he can’t keep the awe out of his voice.  Even with his novice technological expertise, he correctly guesses at what each monitor is (undoubtedly _illegally_) streaming in real-time: on the left is the City of London’s police dispatch, in the middle are multiple and interchanging windows of traffic cameras and closed-circuit videos, on the right is the Pendragon Enterprise’s database in- and output.  To Arthur’s chagrin, Merlin doesn’t buy his feigned scorn either.

“Brilliant, eh?”

Arthur jerks his head in an almost-nod and grunts noncommittally, maneuvering his way through piles of Merlin’s clothes to get closer to the desk.

“Fine, watch _this_.”

Merlin types away, slender fingers ghosting over the keys so quickly Arthur can barely keep track, then swivels the right screen to give Arthur a better view of the new display: a vital signs monitor and an aerial street map marked with a single dot.

“_The fuck_?” Arthur breathes, leaning in closer unnecessarily to watch the blood pressure rise and the pulse rate increase.

“Yep,” Merlin laughs, prodding the dot, “that’s you.”

Arthur rubs the back of his neck where he knows the qualo discs are, feeling somewhat violated.  More astute than Arthur thought him capable, Merlin gets the hint and switches it to the previous stream with a hushed,

“Ah, sorry, guess that was a bit much.”

Still self-conscious, Arthur redirects the conversation with, “So, is this what you do with your spare time?”

Merlin shrugs, squinting at each of the monitors in turn.

“Not exactly.  I just know how, and I figure it’s time to put my know-how to use.”

Arthur raises a skeptical eyebrow.

“You’re saying you just _conveniently_ had all this laying around and you just _conveniently_ know how to set it up and you just _conveniently_ managed to hack the city’s largest databases and The Dragon’s network?”

Another shrug.

“Of all people, Merlin, you don’t need to lie to _me_.”

Their gazes lock; or rather, Arthur feels as if Merlin is trying to see through him, and after a moment, Arthur understands the meaning behind Merlin’s stare.

“I’m not the ‘Arthur’ you know,” he says quietly.  “Sorry.”

Merlin’s eyes shift from Arthur’s face then.

“Like I said, I’m not that stupid,” is the response, a mixture of discomfort and defiance.  Then, abruptly cheery, “So, _poveljnik_1, what first?”

To show the same consideration Merlin had earlier, Arthur overlooks the other man’s sudden change in attitude and (admittedly gratefully) goes along with it.

“How about we dig up on _Führer_2 Uther?”

Though he’s only known Merlin for several hours, Arthur’s sure Merlin’s grin is genuine, going by the crinkling at the corners of his eyes, which are now clear and impishly bright, and the small dimple beneath the left corner of his mouth.  He’s also starting to suspect the reason behind the stirring in his gut, but he’d rather not name it.  For now, at least.

The brunette replies with a hearty, “_Allons y_3!”

In spite of their initial enthusiasm, as midnight turns to one, two, _three _o’clock in the morning, the duo has yet to find any noteworthy information about Uther from the last five years.  Merlin, who (for the most part) patiently taught Arthur how to run commands on the computer, leaves the blonde with researching Uther in the public documents—printed and online publications of newspapers, magazines, stocks, even charities—while he peruses Uther’s bank statements, phone and travel records, and company activities.

“It’s dodgi_er_ that we can’t find anything on him, yeah?” Merlin muses aloud for the umpteenth time, dragging his hand through his wayward hair.

Arthur grunts his agreement _for the umpteenth time_.

Merlin cranes his neck uncomfortably—due to their close proximity, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder—to glare at the unresponsive Arthur’s profile, then stands and stretches bodily before kicking Arthur’s stool (dragged from Merlin’s kitchen sitting room) and groaning,

“I need a kip.”

Arthur watches as the brunette squats at the corner of the mattress, shoves the dubious mess to the floor, and flops belly-first onto the now completely bare bed.  Merlin lifts his head just long enough to face Arthur still resolutely seated at the desk.  He pats the mattress heavily.

“By all means, keep wasting your time, but there’s plenty of room.”

Too tired to sneer or to ignore the twinge in his chest, Arthur only manages to raise an eyebrow.

“As inviting as that sounds, Merlin, I’ve no idea what’s been on that bed.”

“Don’t you mean _who_?” Merlin yawns through a chuckle as his eyelids flutter shut.

Arthur shakes his head in disbelief, rises stiffly, and leaves the room—though not before muttering a vague,

“Night, Merlin.”

On his way out of the flat, Arthur briefly catches sight of the photograph still innocently propped atop the coffee table.

He silently shuts the front door.

 

The drive out of Surbiton feels as short as his night was long and, though Arthur knows he should be fatigued, heading towards the hazy grey-green sky of the oncoming dawn wakes him better than any cup of instant coffee or _hazelnut latte with extra espresso _possibly could.  He isn’t surprised by the absence of cars on the street, but he is by the diligently attentive valet when he pulls up to The Dorchester.  That is, until he realizes that the valet is a Template.  Arthur knows from experience that Temps can physically go for days without rest, which explains why the hotel would have one working as a valet at four in the morning.  The Temp model must’ve been incredibly expensive (or newly designed, or both) since it took until they switched positions for him to notice the seams in the bio-synth skin through the small gap between the jacket cuffs and the kid suede gloves.

“Monsieur Pendragon?”

Arthur turns back, the valet exiting the car and striding up to him with a hand outstretched.  Arthur can’t tell what it is until it’s carefully set in his palm: Merlin’s iPhone.

“Ah, thanks.  Take a few hundred quid for yourself or something.”

The valet bows smoothly before getting back in the Jaguar and veering off.

Arthur doesn’t know why, but he keeps the iPhone securely in his hand and at his side until he gets to the Audley suite.  Then, _then_, immediately after the retinal scan recognizes Junior’s eye and the door barely-audibly clicks open, the iPhone vibrates.  Arthur closes the door and checks the mobile.

_My place @ 1 –M_

“Slimy git,” Arthur mutters.  Then, somewhat annoyed but mostly amused, “_Cheeky bastard_,” when it vibrates once more:

_Bring food_

He tosses the iPhone in the vague direction of the settee and heads for the bedroom, stripping out of his shoes, socks and clothes en route.  But, though he bothers to dim the lights and get under the duvet, he finds he’s still wide awake.  Junior’s body should be exhausted—fuck—his own _mind_ should be exhausted.  He _should_ feel overwhelmed; it’s the first time he’s been swamped with such weird shit right after getting untanked—getting a ridiculous assignment, finding out he’s literally sharing a body with its born identity, meeting _Merlin_.  He resigns himself to a sleepless night and, consequently, a terrible day.

Or so he thinks.  Because one second he’s distinctly (and disgustedly) remembering the feel of Merlin’s hair between his fingers, and the next he’s scrabbling at the bedside table to answer the in-house call.

“Yeah?” he mumbles, hoping he has the phone the right way up.

“Monsieur Pendragon?  It is now eleven in the morning of the twelfth of September,” comes the female voice on the other side of the line.

“That all?”

“You’ve a delivery.  Would you like it brought to your door?”

Arthur forces his eyes open to squint at the floor-length drapes.  The daylight behind them is weak, and he hopes it rains later.

“Yeah, sure, in an hour maybe.”

“As you wish, Monsieur Pendragon.  Shall we supply you with brunch as well?”

He rolls onto his back, pleasantly curling and uncurling his toes.  As he’s about to decline the offer, he remembers Merlin’s pithy command of ‘Bring food’ and instead asks for the lunch menu, which the woman politely provides in entirety—appetizers, entrées, off-the-grill specials, desserts, and wine selections.

“I’ll have the scallops, Angus beef carpaccio, salmon collar, saddle of lamb, and grilled sole,” he drones, repeating whatever he manages to retain.  Then, knowing it probably sounds foolish but hoping it passes as expected pompousness, adds, “To go.”

“As you wish, Monsieur Pendragon.  It will be brought up with your delivery.  May we be of any further service?”

“Just stop calling me _Monsieur Pendragon_.  It sounds fucking stupid from you lot.”

Arthur doesn’t wait for the response.  He’s never shown proper phone etiquette, much less after waking up.  But now that he is, he can’t fall back asleep and so he lumbers from the bedroom and into the bathroom, muttering curses at the hotel service and _eleven in the Godforsaken morning_ and finally at Merlin when he glances at his faintly bruised ribs in the mirror.  He prods the elbow-mark gingerly, guessing the bony bastard got him where Junior had lead buried eighteen months ago.  He showers quickly—more to rouse himself than to get clean—then dons a long-sleeve linen henley and dress pants, again cursing Junior’s wardrobe when he looks down and sees that the neckline is so loose because it has a _poncey lace-up detail_.

He walks aimlessly round the suite barefooted for several minutes before stepping out onto the terrace, the London air thick with the smell of rain that has yet to fall.  But the view of Canary Wharf and of the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral does even less to entertain him so he reenters the sitting room after another few minutes, and instead busies himself with searching for Merlin’s iPhone.  _But_, since he knows exactly where it is, he’s kept busy for a meager four seconds.

He tosses the mobile from one hand to the other in time with his loud, internal mantra of: ‘don’t check it, don’t check it, God damn it, don’t check it.’  This activity, while completely mindless (though, ironically, _not_ effortless considering how badly he wanted to check the God damned phone) makes the time slip by unnoticed until he has to shove on Junior’s oxfords and answer the knocking at the door.

“Sir.”

Arthur fights the urge to smirk, instead pocketing the mobile to receive the concierge’s offerings: a cigar box that is deceptively heavy and a _bloody picnic basket_.

“Thank you, sir.  You’ve already been billed.”

“Take a grand or two,” Arthur grunts, toeing the door closed as the concierge thanks him again.

Arthur stares at the picnic basket for a long, disgruntled moment before setting it down on the coffee table to favor the box of cigars.  Or, rather, _apparent_ box of cigars because, judging by the weight, there is no possible way there are twenty Arturo Fuente Canone cigars inside the humidor.

“The fuck.”

Arthur doesn’t know if he should be proud of his on-target guesswork: the cigars had been replaced with a fully loaded 9 mm Heckler &amp; Koch P8 and two additional fifteen-round mags.  So preoccupied with the machine pistol, he almost misses the small note taped to the inside of the box lid:

_Just in case_

_Ring when you’re dry_

_Leon_

Arthur grimaces; who exactly is expecting him to need arming his second day on the job, Uther or Leon?  He grudgingly concedes that the P8 _is_ in fact an impressive firearm—having handled other HK models, the Glock 31, and the Smith &amp; Wesson M&amp;P3574—but if Uther feels it imperative to provide the artillery himself (Arthur makes his _livelihood_ as a mercenary, after all, he can buy his own damned weapons), it only means the lombard predicts a fair to extensive amount of resistance.

To quote Melin, Arthur mutters a weary, “Buggering fuck,” before closing the humidor and cramming it into the (_fucking poncey_) picnic basket.  He takes up the entire thing and leaves the suite.

With a face like Junior’s, a _lace-up_ shirt, and a _picnic basket_ in hand, you would think that Arthur is just some ordinary, filthy rich kid off to meet his heiress fiancée for lunch at Hyde Park, watching him rush through the hotel lobby.  You wouldn’t think that he is actually a mercenary concealing a handgun in the charming wickerwork headed to Surbiton to feed (and hopefully productively collaborate with) his self-proclaimed hacker sidekick.

What the world doesn’t know won’t get him killed.  Theoretically.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. poveljnik: Slovenian for "commander"  
> 2\. fuhrer: German for "commander" (but who doesn't know that, right?)  
> 3\. allons y!: French for "Let's go!"  
> 4\. yes, I make up cars but not guns  
> 5\. Merthur drabble offer still stands &lt;3


	7. A Kind Of 'A Kind Of Magic'

Pushing 130 kilometres per hour on Malden Way just past the Malden Road roundabout, Arthur muses at his increasingly accurate powers of prediction: the rain is now falling steadily, rhythmically on the Jaguar’s windscreen and light, alloy chassis.  Arthur hums “Stairway to Heaven” while picturing the tasks Leon probably has to do for Uther today: get on his knees and scrub the lombard’s _throne_, or wash his silk underwear by hand, or send his hired man a pistol as a sick joke—shit.  Arthur throws the picnic basket occupying his passenger seat a sidelong glare, hoping it’s intense enough for the P8 to feel it, though not enough to set off any rounds.  Arthur is already fond of the Jaguar.

He parks in the same spot on the street outside Merlin’s apartment.  As smug as he was not ten minutes ago at his oracular ability, hauling the basket of food and chromium steel is less fun and more work in the rain.  It’s little help that he forgot to bring one of Junior’s trench coats, or at least a jacket, so by the time he reaches the building’s main entrance, he’s as annoyed as he is drenched.

The brunette is waiting for him outside his door, leaning against the jamb with his hands deep in his pockets and his legs crossed at the ankles.

“You’re early.”

Arthur heaves the basket into Merlin’s chest and pushes past him into the flat, muttering, “Quit tracking me, will you?”

“Sorry,” is the chuckled, unapologetic response.  “Wet much?”

Arthur sits heavily on Merlin’s couch and strips out of the linen shirt, draping it over the armrest.  Merlin drops the basket onto the coffee table, shooting Arthur a wary look.

“If I know Arthur, and I do,” he says, “you haven’t any skivvies on.”

Arthur laughs derisively.

“Don’t worry, Merlin, I wasn’t planning on getting starkers—”

“What the fuck is this?”

Arthur looks up, about to pull off one of the oxfords.  Merlin is holding the open humidor in one hand and the P8 in the other.  Arthur just shrugs and resumes the removal of his soaked shoes—that is, after making sure Merlin is still holding the pistol by the barrel.

“Another gift from Papa Dragon.  I need to disassemble it and look for bugging devices, so have you got anything I could use?”

“Do you really think Uther would try to track you through a gun?” Merlin asks, frowning down at the P8.  “Doesn’t he know about _your_ locator?”

Arthur, who was suddenly hungry and so took the liberty of unpacking the food from the basket onto the coffee table, looks up at Merlin again, eyebrows high on his forehead.

“Merlin, you’re a prodigy.”

Said prodigy just smirks and lays the gun on the table beside the grilled lamb, settling himself onto the floor and pulling the bowl of scallops closer to sniff them.

“I have my moments.”

Helping himself to whatever grilled fish he ordered, Arthur pauses to point an accusatory fork at Merlin.

“When you have a _hacking_ moment, I’ll give you some credit.  With all the shit you had set up, I thought you’d find something useful for me.”

“Oi, the gun’s closer to me than to you, yeah?  Watch your mouth,” Merlin threatens without heat, also brandishing his fork, which is made even less threatening than Merlin himself due to the large, speared scallop.

Arthur swallows his mouthful of fish to give a snide, “You.  Use a gun.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

It takes a moment, but the déjà vu hits them simultaneously.  Their eyes, equally wide, meet and together they burst out in mutually puzzled, mutually amused laughter.  One late night involving first, a ridiculous, short-lived brawl, second, a ridiculous amount of alcohol and coffee, and third, a ridiculous waste of time wouldn’t normally pave the way for such a comfortable—not friendship.  No, ‘friendship’ is what Merlin had—has—with Junior.  Partnership, or alliance, maybe.  Though Arthur’s never been big on teamwork.

His situation started abnormally.  It seems that won’t be changing.

 

It also seems their abysmal level of productivity wouldn’t be changing either: the food Arthur brought was plenty, even for two grown men, but it takes them another hour to eat it all, what with the constant bickering over each other’s worthlessness in their new “partnership” that once leads to Arthur take up the Heckler &amp; Koch and thrice Merlin.  The third time, while lecturing Arthur about eating vegetables, Merlin unintentionally thumbs off the safety, which in turn prompts Arthur to lecture Merlin for a healthy five minutes about never again touching a gun while Arthur is in firing range.

“Don’t suppose you have to return the basket, do you?” Merlin muses as he stacks the disposable plates, all of them cleaned off, even of vegetables.

Arthur leans back against the couch with a small groan, running a hand through his still-damp hair, and huffs, “For the cost of the meal, I’d say the basket is free.”

Merlin chuckles on his way to the kitchen, saying, “Well, I’ll be dumping it with everything else, if you don’t mind.  I know it went fetchingly with your outfit and all.”

Arthur points a finger at him in warning, watching Merlin shrug and disappear down the hall.  Arthur takes his shirt from the armrest, disappointed to find it has yet to dry, and balls it up and stuffs it between the couch cushions.  Now that he’s nicely fed, Arthur feels even less inclined to work.  Looking idly about the room, his eyes immediately settle on the framed photo once again sitting on the end table.  He’s aware of the twitching in his fingers, the longing to pick it up.  Luckily, the same moment Arthur decides to act on the impulse, rationalizing it as, ‘It’s only out of _curiosity_,’ something gets tossed into his lap and another over his head.

“What’re you—”

“Shut up,” comes Merlin’s voice, somewhere above and to the side of him, sounding a bit coddling and a lot uncertain.  “You won’t find Morgana if you die from a cold.”

Arthur snorts, about to raise a hand to pull off the (what he now recognizes as a) towel from his head, but then something else, something _more_ is on his head: firm yet gentle pressure.  Merlin’s hands.  Merlin’s hands are drying Arthur’s hair.

“I’m not a child,” Arthur mutters.

But something in him makes his hand drop and allows the attention, embarrassing as it is.  Fortunately, he notes a quaver in Merlin’s voice as the brunette disguises his own embarrassment with mindless babbling.

“This has nothing to do with whether or not I think you’re a child, I mean, you _do _seem a bit like Arthur—meaning you’re very prattish and arrogant and insensitive—which makes you seem like a child, but my mum had a neighbor who she was rather fond of who died from the flu—the neighbor, not my mum, she’s well—but this way I’m taking care of you—you and Arthur’s body, you see, so there’s more at stake—even though, I guess Arthur’s fit enough to be able to fend off a cold, but we, I mean you, I suppose, can never be too careful.”

Torn between scoffing and laughing and blushing like a milkmaid, Arthur simply does all three, chuckling through a defensive and bewildered,

“Quit being such a _girl_, Merlin.”

Merlin responds by boxing Arthur’s ears and yanking the towel from his hair.

“Change into those,” Merlin orders, ignoring Arthur’s unmanly squawk.  “Best get you into something dry.  Your arsecheeks must be pruney by now.”

Arthur’s retort catches in his throat when he briefly catches sight of Merlin’s face, the color high in his cheeks, before he turns on his heel and heads to his bedroom with a wry,

“I’ll be working, since _someone_ ought to.”

 

The proffered clothes turn out to be a Chelsea football club jacket and shorts, and Arthur is sorely tempted to punch the tiny wall mirror in Merlin’s bathroom, quite tired of being dressed in ensembles.  But, when the skin of his legs explode with gooseflesh after stripping out of the damp dress pants, he finds he’s rather grateful for the change of clothes.  That is, until he’s struck with the almost-overwhelming realization that Merlin looks nothing like a football (or any kind of sports) fan and that the jacket and shorts fit him comfortably—shit.  Forcing the thought away—_far _away—he relocates Merlin’s iPhone and the Jaguar's key strip to a jacket pocket and marches barefoot to Merlin’s room.

More-than-half suspecting that the amateur hacker would be sleeping, Arthur’s momentarily stunned motionless in the doorway when he sees Merlin alternating between all three computers, busily typing away with a cigarette precariously nestled between the middle and ring fingers of his left hand.

“Won’t get anything done just standing—” Merlin starts, sparing Arthur a glance over his shoulder, a glance that stretches into a stare when Merlin’s eyes rake over Arthur’s body, before Merlin catches himself and diverts his attention to the computers with an absently murmured, “—pretty.”

Arthur toys with the zip of the jacket, unsure if he wants to draw it lower to relieve the flush creeping up his neck from his chest, or higher to conceal it.  He settles for the latter, deciding that just because he feels uncomfortable doesn’t mean he has to advertise the fact.  It takes more effort than it should, but he wills his feet to move in the direction of Merlin’s desk, _unsure_ if he wants to get there quickly or not.  He settles for _not_, dragging his heels across the partially-exposed (due to the perpetual mess procreating in Merlin’s room) hardwood floor.

He perches atop the stool waiting for him and buries his discomfort with a genuinely interested, “Aren’t you boiling with that on?”

Genuinely confused, Merlin faces Arthur bodily, brow furrowed.

“_This_,” Arthur elaborates unasked, lifting a hand—‘_fuck_, why is it shaking again?’—to thumb the bandana tied round Merlin’s neck.

Merlin’s own hand jumps up to his throat, and he mumbles, “No, ‘m fine.”

“Whoa, okay, all right,” Arthur breathes in a rush, holding up both of his hands guiltily and well away from Merlin.  “Just—wondering, I guess, sorry.”

They both freeze the way they are, doe eyes caught in each other’s headlights.  Then, they eerily act at the same time again, each lowering his hands and exhaling shakily, though neither is able to look away.  That is, until they both crick their necks to look at the computers in search of the source of the single, loud beep.  The far-right monitor, now streaming phone records, shows an email from Uther seconds ago forwarded to a mobile:

_Leon, check on the dog._

Arthur and Merlin share mutually satisfied, mutually irritated, knowing looks.  _Dog_ is clearly—though not cleverly—Uther’s euphemism for _Arthur, the mercenary._

“I should go,” Arthur says.

Merlin frowns, saying, “Don’t see why.  Just because they’re ‘checking’ on you doesn’t mean you have to go meet them.”

Arthur stands and says, grinning down at Merlin, “Wouldn’t want to lead them here, now do we?”

“S’pose not,” Merlin chuckles, stubbing out the cigarette with a final hazy exhalation before rising to his feet as well.  “We’ve yet to get anything worthwhile done, anyway.”

Arthur shrugs, making for the door of Merlin’s bedroom and vaguely sensing the brunette trailing behind him.  He gets as far as the front door, shoving on the oxfords and noting the bloody things look bloody stupid with his new bloody outfit.  But Merlin’s voice interrupts his thoughts, his hand on the doorknob.

“Wait, Arthur, the gun.”

He turns to see Merlin taking up the humidor from the coffee table.  They meet halfway, hands outstretched, and the cigar box passes from one trembling hand to another.

“Er, good luck.”

Arthur grins once more.

“What ever for, Merlin?”

And then he’s gone.

Arthur’s pleased to find that the rain has let up enough that he doesn’t have to rush to the Jaguar.  As he puts his hand in the pocket to retrieve the car key strip, the iPhone vibrates against his knuckles.  Not wanting to expose the mobile to the, albeit faintly misting, rain, he first enters the car and sets the humidor in the passenger seat before checking the message, undoubtedly from Merlin.

_In the cigar box.  I trust you know what to do when the stars align._

He passes the key over the ignition pad to start the car and takes up the humidor.  Opening it, he finds two GPS locators the size of fifty-pence pieces.  The look on Arthur’s face would make you think Merlin’s done something to deserve his praise.  Arthur’s delayed and forced huff would make you certain he’ll never admit it.


	8. Action This Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Took a while, but here it is! :D

Arthur takes his sweet time driving back to Westminster, lengthening the forty minutes to a leisurely hour, the duration of which he spends agonizing over, among other (rather insignificant) things, Merlin.  Arthur can’t remember ever having the time for a _proper_ relationship, and he has no preference concerning which gender the other person is, what with the quick and dirty sex with just about anyone when the opportunity presented itself.  But somehow, his attraction to Merlin is more than physical.

This _something more_ attraction is the reason Arthur has occasionally forgotten he’s been qualodumped to fulfill contract terms, not to shag a man who’s probably already been to bed with his body.  The thought alone is infuriating, because he is _not_ Pendragon Junior.  And though he—the actually-cognizant-for-Christ’s-sake Arthur—is by no means a sentimental man, he detests the idea of Merlin wanting to fuck him just because the idiot is daft and delusional enough to think he’s between the sheets with Junior.  Because the way Merlin looks at him—at his _body_—has convinced Arthur that, until eighteen months ago, the two friends had been _something more_.

(The other, ‘rather insignificant’ things he stews over include the apparent impossibility of his job and the unsatisfactory outfits he’s been unable to avoid wearing.)

The Jaguar carefully put away by a (biologically human) valet and the humidor tucked under his arm (after stowing the locators in his jacket pocket with the iPhone), he makes his way through the hotel, still mulling over Junior’s influence over his libido, the only (fucking _microscopic_) consolation being that, aside from itchy fingers and virginal blushes, his body has yet to overtly react to Merlin.  The thought of sporting an erection while sitting beside Merlin at his desk as they watch Uther’s stocks or grocery store cameras makes Arthur uncharacteristically queasy.

The door to the Audley suite opens before he has a chance to scan his eye, and Arthur finds Leon just inside the door, obediently holding it for him—and he’s struck with another sense of déjà vu and a furious desire to stop being tracked, for God’s sake.

“There you are,” the PA sighs, looking (and sounding) more relieved than impatient or annoyed.  Then, watching Arthur tramp into the sitting room and throwing himself onto the settee, fondly adds, “I haven’t seen Arthur wear Pensioners gear in quite a while.”

Arthur places the cigar box on the coffee table before toeing off his shoes and leaning back in his seat to sneer at Leon still standing at the now-closed door.

“Don’t pussyfoot.  Why are you here?”

The older man shrugs, smiling his usual, aggravatingly benign smile, and says, “Just wanted to know why you felt compelled to bring a £300 meal to Surbiton.”

Arthur snorts.

“You mean _Uther_.”

Leon just cocks his head innocently before seating himself on the couch across from Arthur, leaning forward to prop his elbows on his knees.

“Him, too, for different reasons,” he admits.  “But I think you’ve been rather unfairly thrown into this situation, and I’d like to help.”

Rolling his eyes, Arthur lifts his feet to rest them on the table, briefly nudging the humidor with his big toe.  “I think the HK is help enough, though that’s just my _professional_ opinion.  And I don’t see why I need forty-five rounds.”

“Can’t be too careful.”

This further irritates Arthur: this is his _job_, for fuck’s sake.  If _he_ needs protecting, who doesn’t?  His anger must show, because Leon holds up his hands in a strikingly familiar pose of contrition—the same gesture Arthur had to show a jumpy Merlin.  Arthur mutters an apology, to which the other man shakes his head and says,

“No harm, no foul.”

Arthur exhales loudly through his nose.  Then, “I suppose this all has to do with everyone’s Arthur Pendragon complex.  What kind of man is spoiled so bloody rotten?”

Leon throws his head back, laughing heartily.

“ ‘Complex,’ huh?  That’s a new way of putting it, but maybe that’s what it is.”

Arthur reluctantly laughs along.  With the man’s careless honesty, Arthur simply can’t find any justifiable reason to begrudge Leon.

“How about we hit a pub?”

The suggestion draws more, actually real laughter from Arthur.

“It depends,” Arthur finally answers.  “Is this an attempt to get me drunk so you can take advantage of me while I’m uninhibited, or a stupid strategy of monitoring me while operating under the premise of being friendly?”

A shrug.  A smile.

“Both.”

Yeah.  Classic Leon.

 

Leon waits patiently in the sitting room as Arthur quickly showers then dresses in an indecently tight-fitting, all-black outfit comprised of a knitted jumper and silk trousers.  And, though he once again forgoes the matching (Hermes) scarf, he grudgingly admits the snakeskin boots go well with everything else—and he can’t go out in wet shoes anyway.  And, _once again_, Arthur is the very image of a date-goer—this time paired with the elegantly masculine Leon in his three-piece suit instead of an heiress fiancée—as he nags Leon about his day at work, and Leon in turn nags him about his activities that kept him out so late the previous night, and they lightheartedly argue over whose vehicle they’ll be taking.  They efficiently establish that:

1) Leon did not clean toilets or underwear,

2) Arthur did not do anything dishonorable, and

3) the GPS-equipped Range Rover makes for a better choice.

Despite being just past three in the afternoon, Leon immediately locates a pub nearby without using the SUV’s GPS device.  Arthur guesses that Leon’s been here before, considering the pub has no sign anywhere on its façade, and so maybe it wouldn’t have appeared on the GPS anyway.  Leon parks the Range Rover on the opposite side of the road, though keeping it visible from the pub.

The pub itself turns out to be the opposite of Uther’s mansion: plain on the outside, welcoming on the inside.  The window panes, whether from age or from manufacturing, are copper-tinted, staining the midday sunlight caramel.  The codger tending the bar greets each of them with a nod of his head—and waggles his bushy, white eyebrows at Arthur.  Arthur also revises his earlier assumption: Leon must come here _a lot_ because a (decent) cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Achilles Last Stand” wavers from hidden stereo speakers at a tasteful volume.

Feeling a bit out of place compared to the obvious regulars—middle-class, middle-aged men (though both labels are arbitrary these days, with the large rift between “classes” and _anyone_ can outlive their own lifetimes) discussing football or divorce or retirement in pocketed clouds of cigarette smoke—, Arthur settles into a booth while Leon gets their drinks.  Surprisingly, the leather of the seat is soft and buttery, and the table is neither sticky nor crumb-littered.  More surprising still, the beer is good—or at least less urine-tasting than cheaper brews.

Their first two pints each disappear within several minutes, several minutes that pass in _surprisingly_ not uncomfortable silence.  Then, at the start of their third round, and as the fates (or perhaps only Arthur’s luck) would have it, Leon speaks first.

“Why exactly were you in Surbiton, if not to do—ah, what was it—_dishonorable_ things?  And if you don’t mind me asking.”

Arthur _does_ mind, but with the way Leon is smiling politely intrigued, the feeling wilts and Arthur finds he doesn’t, in fact, mind answering.

“My job, of course.”

That is, he doesn’t mind answering vaguely.

“Yes, of course.”

Leon sounds about as convinced as he looks like a woman.  Thus, not at all.  Arthur knows this and so smiles crookedly, provoking more from the older man.  Leon, being Leon, kindly obliges.

“Uther doesn’t trust you.”

While sipping from his beer, Arthur considers his possible answers:

1) _Do you think I give a flaming fuck, Leon?_  This would be Arthur’s instinctive response, but, being a hypothetical and rather aggressive question, it would be wasted breath on the PA.

2) _Do _you_ trust me, Leon?_  This would be a purely selfish question, the answer to which Arthur doesn’t know _why_ he wants to know or _if_ he wants to know.

3) _Good, because I don’t trust him either, Leon_.  Apart from the first option, this would be the most true to Arthur’s feelings, but also an implied, thus redundant, fact.

4) _Why do I have to say Leon’s name when he’s the only person I could even be speaking to?_  While this is not an actual option, the thought occurs nonetheless, and Arthur finds himself peeved by his need to address the other man by name even in his head, wondering if it’s just more of Junior stirring.  Except _that_ thought snowballs, and he’s so busy yelling at Junior to ‘back the fuck off into your coma hole’ (useless thing to do, really) that when he hears what he says next, he’s at a complete loss as to which _Arthur_ is speaking.

“Do _you_ trust me, Leon?”

_The fuck_?

‘The fuck?’ precisely describes the expression mirrored in both men’s faces, until Leon shatters the stunned silence with more uproarious laughter.  On the other hand, Arthur mentally flogs himself and Junior, both, while half-heartedly chuckling once or twice.  Or maybe more times than that, because he has to put his glass down to avoid spilling the still-considerable amount of beer.

“As a matter of fact, I do,” Leon says brightly between gulps of air.

Whether intentionally or not, Leon’s confession shuts Arthur up.  Or nearly does.

“Come again?”

“As a matter—of fact—I—do,” Leon enunciates, smirking.

 

Arthur tries to remember the basic premise of Occam’s razor: the best explanation is the simplest one.  Unfortunately for Arthur, his options—1) I’ve been drinking, 2) Leon was looking at me _like that_, and 3) Junior _must_ be to blame, bloody tosser—are all very different, while at the same time, all perfectly plausible explanations as to why the two men are melded together, hands fisting in blonde hair and roaming under _too many_ expensive clothes, mouths fitting with each other so their moans can hardly be told apart from their greedy tongues.

“Make it a habit of snogging your boss’s son, Leon?” Arthur chides, panting against Leon’s bristly jaw.

The older man’s chuckle stirs even the ion-purified, surgically sterile, daintily lavender-scented air in the hotel corridor, the damp warmth of it making the already-flushed skin of Arthur’s neck prickle.

“Forgive the impudence, but _you_ have _me_ against this very lovely, romantic and—needless to say—_public_ bit of wall here, so I believe the pertinent question is: do you make it a habit of snogging your boss’s personal assistant, _Arthur_?”

For once, Arthur is at a loss for an answer—not even a half-decent, half-relevant, half-_foolish_ one.  He steps back and cringes at two simultaneous realizations.  First, that _he_ is indeed the one sandwiching _Leon_ against the (not lovely, not romantic, but very public) wall.  Second, that there is an obvious, immediate loss of heat and _want_ with their bodies separated.  Then, _then_, another cringe-inducing thought wriggles into his head: if it were _Merlin_, Arthur would smooth out the wrinkles in his clothes and the knots in his hair.  Fuck-all if he knows which Arthur would do something so pathetic.

“And for the record,” comes Leon’s voice, as if from a long way away though only a metre of now-stale, awkward air is between them, “that’s the first time this has happened.”

Arthur snorts, turning to lean against the wall—making sure not to touch Leon—and running his fingers through his own tangled hair.

“That’s a relief.  Here I was thinking Junior found a way of sneaking out of his disc again.  I’m _thrilled_ to know that that was all me.”

“ ‘Again,’ you say.”

Going by the somewhat malicious, mostly curious tone of the other man’s voice, Arthur is glad he can’t see Leon’s face.

“Yes, Leon,” Arthur grits, “he and I share the desire to strangle you.”

Leon’s resulting laugh, warm and playful, is oddly comforting in its familiarity, and Arthur manages to give him a tight-lipped smile.

“Now, as much as I enjoyed our ‘first kiss,’ I’m supposed to be working, yeah?”

Leon just laughs again, shouldering himself upright and checking his Rolex.

“I’ve had better.  But you’re right; I shan’t keep you any longer.  You ought to be using your two months wisely.”

Arthur gets as far as facing the retinal scanner before:

“Wait.  What?” he growls.  “What _the fuck_ did you just say?”

“You mean that I’ve had better first kisses?” Leon throws carelessly over his shoulder, walking away casually.  “It’s true, I’m afraid.”

Leon pauses upon hearing Arthur’s muttered ‘_Buggering fuck_’ and turns back, already ten, fifteen metres away.

“Didn’t I tell you?” he says, cocking his head innocently.  “Uther moved your deadline.  He noticed that you haven’t done much the past two days, so this is his way of motivating you—both Arthur and Morgana are rather important to him, after all.”

In two, three strides, Arthur reaches Leon, taking the man by his suit lapels and shoving him against the wall in a disturbingly reminiscent position.

“The bastard said four months,” he hisses.  “He signed, _I_ signed.  Four bloody months, not two.”

Leon’s neutral expression only serves to further anger Arthur, but he shakily lowers his hands in favor of glaring at Leon.

“This the ‘unfair situation’ you were talking about?”

A shrug and a grin.

“Fuck the lot of you.”


	9. The Night Comes Down

Arthur spends an unhealthy hour and a half simply standing under the harsh spray of the shower, alternating between scalding and freezing water, and coming out more (as Merlin so eloquently put it) ‘pruney’ than clean feeling.  A towel slung low around his hips, he steps out onto the terrace.  The midday rain has returned in earnest, the large drops catching the overwhelming, oversaturated rays of the descending autumn sun, swathing the entire view in oranges, reds, and purples of the depth and opacity of arterial blood.  It takes an indefinite amount of time, but Arthur watches as the windows of the Canary Wharf skyscrapers change from an opalescent pink to a rusty orange and finally sunset’s hazy violet.

When the rain lessens to a caressing mist, he finally reenters the suite.  At that moment, closing the terrace door and absently noticing the reflection of the delicate sheen of the silk-lined wall in the glass with the dusky scenery behind it, an unnerving weariness settles over him.  It’s an exhaustion heavier, more suffocating than any physical sort Arthur knows—deeper than in joints or marrow or nerve endings.  If he fell asleep, even now, he fears, both, that it would do little to remedy the fatigue and that he would never want to wake again.  Arthur likens it to grief beyond tears, or perhaps the ironic, subconscious lack of sensation caused by third-degree burns.

He trudges to the bedroom, only to stare helplessly down at the over-made bed, at a loss as to whether or not he should sleep.  Peering at the bedside table, he finds it’s just after seven, a pathetic bedtime for a man of Junior’s or his (subjective) age.  Still, he tugs the corner of the duvet, drops the towel—

_Come to bed_.

He sways, vision blurring, back of his neck burning—

_Arthur, come to—_

He collapses onto the bed, manages to sit upright only for a moment before lurching against the dozen or so pillows, hands scrabbling at the back of his head, unsure if he should cover his ears or dig out the qualo discs from his nape to make it—

_—freezing, Arthur, come to bed._

To make it stop—

_Arthur._

“_Make it stop_!”

One, two seconds pass.  Arthur opens eyes he doesn’t remember squeezing shut to the point of tears and multicolored sparks; he releases the breath he doesn’t remember holding and regretting it at once when he’s overcome with the nagging urge to vomit.  He takes one, two ragged breaths, now aware of the pinpricks of pain from his nails still buried in his scalp.

“Fucking—_fuck_—”

His eyes dart to Merlin’s iPhone harmlessly lying atop the bedside table.

“_Fuck_ that—”

So he says, but then he feels a sudden loss of control over his body—the Gauntlet—and watches as his—no, _the_—arm reaches for the mobile, his—_its_—fingers trembling.  He sighs shakily, relieved to see Merlin hasn’t sent anything, while at the same time noting a roaring rush of disappointment.  He slams it back onto the ebony wood before slumping back against the pillows, and it takes a few frustrating attempts to draw his legs onto the bed.  Then, even though the flood of _auditory _memories have ceased, the feel of the sheets on his naked skin triggers more, different, intense _tactile_ memories—slender fingers wrapped round his biceps—_why won’t they stop—_a stubbled cheek to his own, a bony chest flush against his back—_it’s all in my head, I’m imagining not remembering_—warm lips mouthing against his ear—_fuck, stop, fucking stop_—

And they do.

The memories finally stop when he hauls his torso over the edge of the bed in time to retch onto the plush and pristine butter crème carpet.  Even spilling his guts—lamb and bile and scallops and beer and someone else’s nostalgia—onto the floor, he somehow hears the soft hum of the iPhone vibrating against the wood of the bedside table and finds the energy to laugh.  Heaving dry and empty, he fumbles for the mobile.

_Your vitals indicate you’re either having an orgasm or an epileptic seizure, but I don’t know which I’m more worried about._

“Fucking twat,” he coughs.

“I hope you’re not talking about me.”

Arthur wipes his mouth on the back of his hand before looking up at the voice.

“Speak of the devil.”

 

“Sweet mother of Christ, what happened to you?”

Arthur bats at the cold, damp towel Merlin’s dabbing on his face and neck, grunting, “The answer hasn’t changed since the first two times you asked—I was drinking.  Now could you possibly do me the courtesy of answering _my_ thrice-asked question: what the _fuck_ are you doing here?”

“Your answer is a little hard to believe; it’s been hours since you were out and I doubt you were drinking by yourself when you got back here,” Merlin says, towel still insistent in his hand.  “Well, even if you _had _been drunk—er, not that I completely doubt you or anything—at least you had the presence of mind to tag Leon’s vehicle.”

Arthur grabs Merlin’s wrist mid-swipe of his collarbones, squeezing hard enough to assure the brunette of his seriousness but not _so _hard as to hurt him.

“I asked you a question, Merlin, and it’s in your best interests that you answer.”

Merlin’s shifty expression makes Arthur (impossibly) more anxious.

“You’re ill, so it’s not important for now,” is all he says, pulling against Arthur’s grip fruitlessly.

Their half-hearted game of tug-of-war with Merlin’s wrist continues for another few moments before Arthur finally releases his hold and lets his arm drop heavily onto his cold-sweat covered chest.  It’s only then that Arthur realizes he’s _very_ naked lying _on_ the duvet, and that Merlin is _very_ clothed sitting on the edge of the bed beside his _naked_ hip.

Merlin catches the subtle shift of the mattress as Arthur tries desperately to inch away from him.  The brunette’s eyes are as pitying as they are amused—a rather dubious combination, but it doesn’t stop Arthur from trying to wriggle away.

“It’s nothing I haven’t seen before.”

The solemn thinning of Merlin’s lips draws a snort from Arthur.

“Yeah, that fact became all too clear ten minutes ago, thanks.”

Arthur feels Merlin stiffen, and there’s a long pause before:

“You’re saying he woke up?  Arthur did?  That’s what was wrong with you?”

Hoping the other man is too preoccupied reminiscing about his lover (whose body Arthur is currently operating), Arthur rolls to the opposite side of the bed and stands, looking about uselessly for some makeshift form of cover and, finding none, prays it’s safe (enough) to make the short stretch between the bedroom and the dressing room.  Arthur gets as far as the doorway—

“Cheers.”

Arthur’s hands jump to his groin, his head whips back to face Merlin.

“Who _the fuck_ is this guy?”

Merlin stands and peers over Arthur’s shoulder dumbly before mumbling, “Bloody Christ, sorry, I forgot.”

Arthur looks between Merlin, the newcomer—an olive-skinned, mocha-haired, just-shaven, twenty-something version of Leon—and back, finding it painfully difficult to _not_ rampage about the suite in search of the Heckler &amp; Koch.  Instead, he diffuses his stress with a feral growl.

“Out—the both of you—now.”

He hears the front door open and close and, still facing Merlin, jerks his head.

“Go on.”

Merlin takes a hesitant first step.  Then, his voice pleading in spite of his pale, stony face, “We’re here about Arthur and Morgana.  And Uther.”

“Out.”

Merlin’s eyes narrow for a moment, before he obediently and mercifully sidles around Arthur and exits after the stranger.  Arthur collapses against the door jamb, faintly discerning their voices from the other side of the door.  Just as he’s about to tell himself he _couldn’t give a flaming fuck_, the vibrating drone of the mobile floats from across the room.

“Buggering—”

At first, Arthur is angered by the gall of Merlin and his companion; then, he’s angered by his (or is it Junior’s?) need to check what the bastards have to say.  Halfway to the bedside table, Arthur shakes himself violently and decides that, if they _truly_ had something important to tell him, they would wait as long as it takes.  They are at his mercy, and so, instead, he turns on his heel and (successfully) makes his second attempt at getting dressed—maybe not entirely ‘successfully’ as he resigns himself to wearing another obscenely fitted, black knit jumper (though he is, for the briefest moment, sorely tempted to actually use the matching Gucci scarf just to spite Merlin).

He rises from slipping on the boots he wore earlier and gives himself a perfunctory once-over. You would think, as someone with an expiration date, Arthur would try to appreciate any ‘small consolations,’ especially since those are the only things he has been (and will likely continue) getting in his situation.  But, all he can think as he looks into the mirror is that, at least, he doesn’t look _more_ poncey than usual.

 

“This is Lancelot, but we just call him L.”

The toasted version of Leon hums in greeting without actually looking up at Arthur, as he and Merlin are both too busy typing away incessantly on the MacBookCzar1 laptops set up on the sitting room coffee table.

“Is this a first meeting or a re-introduction?” Arthur asks, pacing behind the couch the other men are occupying.

“First meeting,” the two brunettes answer in unison.

For one long moment, Arthur wonders if they’re lying.  But there’s no itching of recognition from Junior, so he just shrugs internally before stomping round to the other side of the couch and sitting heavily on the settee.

“So, what’s so bloody important that you needed to break into my hotel room? You realize Uther’s tracking me, yeah? How am I going to explain someone coming in when I didn’t _leave_ after Leon?”

“I marqueed the room access,” Merlin supplies noncommittally.  “The hotel databases will only register whenever _you_ pass the threshold because of your tagged disc.  Me, L, and Gwen are technically ghosts.”

Arthur, who was in the middle of straining to peer outside the terrace door to check on the rain (another bloody, mundane activity, he admits), snaps his neck to face them.

“Who the fuck is Gwen?”

“My wife, is _who the fuck_,” Lancelot grunts, eyes never leaving his screen, fingers never leaving his keyboard.

“She works in PR at The Dragon’s Lair like Morgana used to,” Merlin adds.

“Well, jolly good.  This your new _vive la résistance_ headquarters then?” Arthur scoffs, trying to sound condescending but finding it difficult due to the sheer stupidity of the idea.

There’s a pause in which the brunette duo exchange smirks.  Lancelot resumes his typing, and Merlin takes his time before answering—dealing a definitive tap to his keyboard, leaning back against the couch, lighting a cigarette, and finally locking gazes with Arthur.

“Glad you’ve caught on.  Welcome to the team.”

Merlin and Lancelot spend the next ten minutes explaining in turns the basis of their relationship and visit:

The two men are independent hackers, but sixteen months ago (thus two months after Junior and Morgana’s incident) Merlin caught Lancelot cracking the Pendragon Enterprises security systems using the (free and _very public_) internet access of the coffee shop at which Merlin works—Arthur finds some amusement in the fact that Merlin _works_ and at a coffee shop.  Lancelot had revealed to Merlin that his wife, Guinevere, was (is) best friends with Morgana, and Merlin had revealed to Lancelot that he was (is) best friends (and/or more) with Junior.  Since then, the three have been combing through the Pen-Ent records, Gwen from the inside, Lancelot with brute hacking force and taking odd jobs that kept him onsite, and Merlin taking the rear by sweeping their traces (Arthur cringes at the imagery of Merlin ‘taking the rear,’ feeling a mix of disgust and defiance).

“It’s taken all these sixteen months, but we’ve finally found something,” Merlin concludes, stubbing out his third consecutive cigarette in the martini-glass-turned-ashtray.

“Well, don’t just sit there looking so smug, Merlin,” Arthur grits.  “What is it you’ve finally found?”

“No need to get snappy—”

“Uther named Morgana as the Pendragon Enterprises beneficiary, not Arthur.”

Merlin tugs a fistful of Lancelot’s hair, whining, “Damn it, L, _I_ wanted to deliver the bad news punch line!”

Lancelot just snorts and pinches Merlin’s arm.  Arthur watches this exchange numbly, but the feeling of disgust mixed with defiance coils low in his belly.  _They’re just friends, they’re just friends, they’re just friends_, he chants in his head, until the disgust intensifies—he’d thought Merlin and Junior had been ‘just friends.’

“Bleeding Christ.”

“I know, right?” Merlin mock-whispers, eagerly, conspiratorially, and Arthur blinks, not having realized he’d said that aloud.

“Er, yeah, what do you make of that, then?” Arthur asks, feigning interest.

“It’s _obvious_—”

“The job’s not done.”

“For fuck’s sake!” Merlin howls, grabbing Lancelot’s shoulder with both hands and giving it a vigorous shake.  “I would’ve made that sound so much cooler.  Not that it’s good news or anything.”

_They’re just friends, they’re just friends_—

“What does this all mean?” Arthur sighs.

Merlin covers Lancelot’s mouth with one hand as a preemptive measure, and Arthur sees the tender, affectionate crinkling at the corners of Lancelot’s chocolate-brown eyes.

_They’re just fucking friends, no, wait, not _fucking _friends_—

“It’s obvious,” Merlin attempts once more, “the group’s aim is to undo Uther’s company.  So they kidnapped the heir_ess_, and they’re waiting on the name to change to Arthur before they take care of him as well.”

As a means of distracting himself from his immature thoughts, Arthur stares at Merlin critically, though he can’t help his eyes drifting to Merlin’s hand still comfortably nestled on the lower half of Lancelot’s face.

“Your speculations come from that one name on one form?”

Merlin shrugs, his pale, long-fingered hand leaving its perch to comb through his haphazard hair before taking up another cigarette and setting it to his lips—Arthur follows the surprisingly graceful movements, glad neither brunette is paying him much attention.

“All renegades think the same way.  And Uther’s choice of industry warrants irrational kidnapping plots, I’d say.”

Lancelot rolls his eyes, though he is grinning widely.  Arthur narrows his eyes, convinced of Merlin’s idiocy.  The end of the cigarette flares into life and dusk settles.  Arthur foresees a long night ahead.  The small consolation?  Maybe he’ll get some real work done.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. MacBookCzar = most awesome sounding Apple product ever! I hope they exist...500 years in the future.  
> (2. I love the idea of calling Lancelot "L" x3)


	10. Good Company

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Belated and short chapter is BELATED AND SHORT. Many apologies from Lui.

The trio spends the next hour dissecting Uther’s legal documents—Arthur berating Merlin for the better part of ten minutes (he has the liberty to do so only because he can do nothing but sit there while the brunettes do all the ‘work’) for not thinking of it sooner—and finds that the change from joint titles between Uther’s son _and_ niece to Morgana, alone, was finalized two months before the double-attack.  Ideally, theoretically, there _should_ have only been two people aware of the change: Uther, and his attorney, Gaius.

“Uther’s too smart to have told anyone,” Merlin says, smoke seeping from his mouth and nostrils, back arching and arms reaching in a feline stretch—inadvertently drawing Arthur’s eyes to the long lines of Merlin’s biceps and the deliciously pale skin of his abdomen peeking from beneath the hem of his careworn t-shirt.

“Then it must have been the attorney,” Arthur mutters.

“No,” Lancelot cuts swiftly.  “He’s been under Uther’s employ even before Pen-Ent was conceived.  Nor does he have anything to gain, save for retirement, from the dismantling of the company.  It was someone from the outside.  And the group responsible for the kidnapping must be good: it took them _less than_ two months to find the information since they would’ve needed just as much time to set up the kidnapping, _and_ they left no traces that they’d been in there.  They must’ve been anticipating the switch, so they’re outside but not far.  We should start looking into his rival establishments.”

Arthur’s gaze shifts to the other brunette.  Arthur doesn’t know why, but he’s somewhat miffed that Lancelot never addresses him directly, always too focused on the laptop to favor Arthur with even a perfunctory glance when speaking to him.  But with Merlin, Lancelot has no problem taking him by the bony elbow or calling him by name to get his attention.

And speaking of Merlin—

“Gods, L, you’re such a genius, I swear,” the spindly brunette gushes, bumping their shoulders together.

Arthur (barely) suppresses a shudder; Junior, on the other hand, roils unrestrained at the increasingly frayed ends of Arthur’s consciousness.

“Fucking ridiculous—” he hisses.

“What was that?”

What _was_ annoyance at Junior is now annoyance at the duo on the couch.  Do they have to keep up their speaking-in-tandem shtick?  Wasn’t it enough that they’d bragged about getting cozy together over computers and coffee to play detectives?

“Er,” Arthur starts.  “I mean, Uther must have more enemies than allies.  Going through each of them is a ridiculous plan.”

Merlin hums his disappointed agreement.  Lancelot, though:

“I’ve found the three most likely: Bayard, Alined, and Hengist,” he rattles off, rotating his MacBook slightly to show Merlin.

Well, at least he fooled one of them.

But Arthur, in a move so shallow and immature he can’t trace it to Junior or himself, stands, saunters around the coffee table, plops down on Merlin’s other side, and leans forward so he’s draped across Merlin’s knobbly knee on the pretense of looking at Lancelot’s screen.

“Christ, you are a genius, _L_,” Arthur says, feeding _just_ enough awe in his voice to sound genuinely interested, and _just_ enough camaraderie into the man’s nickname to sound genuinely impressed—though hopefully hiding his irritation and suspicion.

He peers over his shoulder at Merlin, then at Lancelot.  Lancelot is actually looking Arthur in the face, making no effort to look impassive as _irritation and suspicion_ are clearly painted over his godforsaken, charming features.  Merlin’s eyebrows are high on his forehead, eyes wide, and for a second Arthur wonders if he’s only succeeded in making himself look a fool.  But then he realizes Merlin is grinning crookedly.  Arthur returns the smile.  Merlin knows what Arthur’s doing, but Arthur doesn’t mind, especially when he feels Merlin’s thigh twitch against his ribs.

“See, L?  Everyone thinks you are,” Merlin says, but he’s still staring into Arthur’s face, and it’s then that Arthur notes the faint, opalescent gold rings around Merlin’s irises.

A loud snort makes both Arthur and Merlin jump, and Arthur finally sits up properly to throw Lancelot a withering glare which is wasted when he sees the other man is busy checking his own iPhone.

“Gwen’s on her way,” Lancelot says loudly, as if to bulldoze the air of intimacy.  “But you’re more than welcome to carry on in the bedroom, so long as you keep the noise down.  I know you tend to get noisy, Merlin, even if it is just _eye sex_.”

And he does a right job of it.

 

Gwen, Arthur discovers, is sweet, bubbly and honest to a fault.  She arrives half an hour after Arthur and Lancelot’s game of Merlin-in-the-middle, Lancelot leaving the suite to meet her in the hall.  Alone, she enters with beer, Chinese takeout, and a third MacBook Czar.  Arthur’s first thought is that Lancelot had childishly _tattled_ on him for their earlier confrontation; his second is that Lancelot hid a gun in the grease-leaking paper boxes; third is that he—or, rather, Junior—has met Gwen before.

She confirms this herself when, after depositing her load on the coffee table with the existing clutter, she leans down to him, still seated on the couch beside Merlin, and touches their cheeks together, the brush of curly hair that’s escaped the loose bun at her nape against his temple comfortably familiar.  Merlin coughs to conceal a half-snort, half-laugh.

“Wrong ‘Arthur,’ Gwen,” Merlin mock-whispers.

She jerks upright, the fingers of one hand covering her lips.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” she gasps, “I’m sorry.  I just haven’t seen you, shit, him in a while.  I got excited.”

Arthur and Merlin are now laughing silently, shoulders rubbing together, and Arthur dimly wonders when they had gotten so physically close.

“I hope this one’s better than the last,” she adds conversationally, taking up a beer bottle and twisting off the cap.

This puts an end to Arthur’s laughter, if only to make Merlin’s audible.  Obnoxiously audible.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Arthur asks, though he’s busy glaring at Merlin.

Gwen takes Arthur’s previous spot on the settee and jumps the glare-at-Merlin-to-shut-up bandwagon, before explaining, her tone still casual and light, “Oh, didn’t either of these no-good sods tell you?”

“Er—”

“Arthur Pendragon and I used to date.  _Years_ ago, mind you.  Definitely a learning experience for me.”

He doesn’t know what sick, twisted god compels him to, but Arthur faces Merlin—now beside himself and positively roaring in hysterics—and brackets the brunette’s head with both hands, one at his nape, the other over his nose and mouth.  It does little to muffle the sound, but Arthur finds sick, twisted satisfaction at the feel of Merlin in his hands—the heated without being sweaty skin above the knot of his bandana, the barely-there stubble, the fullness of his lips, the wet warmth of his trapped laughter.

“I see you’re as much a pouf as the last,” Gwen muses curiously, snidely.

“Where’s your beloved?” Arthur asks, deflecting her comment with a tight smile.

“Grabbing the artillery,” she answers disinterestedly, waving the beer bottle.  “That’s why we broke it off, you know, me and Arthur.  Two months in, he found Merlin piss drunk behind a med school building.  Instead of a proper shag, I got stuck with his stray cat, and they’ve been together ever since.  Well, until a year and a half ago, anyway.”

Her words are fond rather than spiteful; though the same can’t be said of Merlin, who licks Arthur’s palm obscenely, forcing the blonde to retract his hand with a yelp.

“_Gwen_—!”

Merlin puts a stopper on his outburst and slowly turns to Arthur, eyes narrowed with confusion.  Arthur narrows his eyes as well, silently challenging the slighter man, before he feels his jaw go slack and his eyes widen: his hand is still comfortably cupping the back of Merlin’s neck.

Gwen hums amusedly, opening a takeout box of some brightly colored sautéed meat and sniffing it.  Then, unsheathing and splitting a pair of chopsticks, “I see what L meant by the sexual tension.  It would smell like musk in here if it weren’t for Merlin’s cigarettes and Arthur’s cologne.”

Arthur withdraws his hand slowly—to appear less mortified than he feels—and, for the second time that night, tries to discreetly inch away from Merlin’s person.  Bugger-all if he can’t help relishing in the residual heat still pooled in his hand, guiltily sticking it in his trouser pocket to preserve the feeling for a few moments more.

“So,” Gwen chirps, still chewing and still gleeful, “the boys, I take it, have already informed you of Morgana’s name on Uther’s will?”

Arthur grabs two beers, clamping one bottle between his knees to open the other which he hands to Merlin before opening the second for himself.

“Cheers,” Merlin mutters.

The uncertainty in Merlin’s tone piques even Arthur’s attention, and he casts the brunettes a sidelong glance, head tilted back and taking a generous mouthful of the cold, bitter liquid.

“What?” he asks through a grimace, watching Merlin’s eyes dart between the bottle clenched in his pale fist and Arthur’s (of all things) knees.  “What is it, Merlin?”

Merlin’s lips part—_gods, those lips—shit, I did _not_ just think that_—but before he can garble an explanation, there’s a knock at the door.

“Hm, must be L,” Gwen says, standing to answer it.

But _even Arthur_ catches the amusement in her voice, and his hands—one still in his pocket, the other gripping the sweating beer bottle—tremble with his irritation.  When it was just Merlin and himself working together, things weren’t so confusing and bothersome.  Sure, there were two distinct stirrings of desire in his head (or is it his groin?), but at least then, in Merlin’s endearingly messy flat, the deceptively sexy—_bloody hell, I _did not_ just think _that—brunette was the only witness to Arthur’s attraction.

The long night is only getting longer. 


	11. Put Out the Fire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To those (re)reading and/or checking up on this series,
> 
> PLEASE NOTE that this is not a true chapter. It is only THIRTY-EIGHT words long. These are the 38 words I already had written when I recently opened the document for the first time in more than a year, and I'm afraid I've lost track of what I'd meant to write, for chapter and series both.
> 
> I can't stop you from reading these 38 words, and maybe it's even a bit cruel to post them at all since I haven't updated in nearly two years, but I needed the place to announce that I am extending those (unannounced) two years into AN INDEFINITE HIATUS. It is not for want of inspiration so much as for time and energy. Perhaps someday I will be able to pick it up once more.
> 
> In the meantime, if someone would like to adopt and adapt it into their own story (dump and untank it, if you will), feel free to do so, so long as you contact me beforehand. I'd love to see this story completed, even if it's not by me.
> 
> My thanks and apologies and more thanks still,  
> Lulu Fisher

“What the hell was that?”

Merlin, resting his forearms on the terrace rail, beer bottle in one hand, another lit cigarette between the fingers of the other, turns at the sound of Arthur’s half-confused, half-annoyed voice. He raises his eyebrows for a moment, appraising the blonde, before smirking and facing the near-midnight skyline once more. He doesn’t acknowledge Arthur’s approach nor when the blonde mimics his stance and leans against the rail.

Arthur finds himself aware of the heat from the hacker’s pale, bony forearm inches away from his own, but he just feebly blames the chilly air. For want of anything better to do, he steals the cigarette and takes a drag. He’s smoked before, but the bite of it is painful and unfamiliar in Junior’s body.

“Don’t do that,” Merlin mutters, snatching the nicotine lollipop back. “Arthur’s an athlete. His lungs aren’t made for smoking.”

Arthur exhales with an audible sigh.

“The amount of time you two’ve spent together, I’d say he’s already been exposed to enough second-hand smoke to be a heavier smoker than you are.”

Merlin takes one last lengthy pull before flicking the cigarette from the balcony.

“Touché.”

The brunette’s sigh hovers before them in the cold, dense air, the cloud of nicotine taking its sweet time in dissipating.

“Break time’s over.”

Arthur spares Merlin a sidelong glance before snorting once.

“I think they can carry on without us for a little while longer.”


	12. Don't Stop Me Now

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To those (re)reading and/or checking up on this series,
> 
> PLEASE NOTE that this is not a true chapter. It is only TWO-HUNDRED-THIRTY-EIGHT words long. These are the 238 words I already had written when I recently opened the document for the first time in more than a year, and I'm afraid I've lost track of what I'd meant to write, for chapter and series both.
> 
> I can't stop you from reading these 238 words, and maybe it's even a bit cruel to post them at all since I haven't updated in nearly two years, but I needed the place to announce that I am extending those (unannounced) two years into AN INDEFINITE HIATUS. It is not for want of inspiration so much as for time and energy. Perhaps someday I will be able to pick it up once more.
> 
> In the meantime, if someone would like to adopt and adapt it into their own story (dump and untank it, if you will), feel free to do so, so long as you contact me beforehand. I'd love to see this story completed, even if it's not by me.
> 
> My thanks and apologies and more thanks still,  
> Lulu Fisher

“What the hell was that?”

Merlin, resting his forearms on the terrace rail, beer bottle in one hand, another lit cigarette between the fingers of the other, turns at the sound of Arthur’s half-confused, half-annoyed voice. He raises his eyebrows for a moment, appraising the blonde, before smirking and facing the near-midnight skyline once more. He doesn’t acknowledge Arthur’s approach nor when the blonde mimics his stance and leans against the rail.

Arthur finds himself aware of the heat from the hacker’s pale, bony forearm inches away from his own, but he just feebly blames the chilly air. For want of anything better to do, he steals the cigarette and takes a drag. He’s smoked before, but the bite of it is painful and unfamiliar in Junior’s body.

“Don’t do that,” Merlin mutters, snatching the nicotine lollipop back. “Arthur’s an athlete. His lungs aren’t made for smoking.”

Arthur exhales with an audible sigh.

“The amount of time you two’ve spent together, I’d say he’s already been exposed to enough second-hand smoke to be a heavier smoker than you are.”

Merlin takes one last lengthy pull before flicking the cigarette from the balcony.

“Touché.”

The brunette’s sigh hovers before them in the cold, dense air, the cloud of nicotine taking its sweet time in dissipating.

“Break time’s over.”

Arthur spares Merlin a sidelong glance before snorting once.

“I think they can carry on without us for a little while longer.”


End file.
